I was driving along a lovely bit of road, somewhere in deepest Oxfordshire. The A40 was boring me to tears, so I’d turned off to take a more inter­est­ing route home. The road twisted, turned and undulated beneath us. Alas it did so very slowly, because the traffic ahead was moving at a rather leisurely pace.

Eventually the road opened out into a long, clear straight. I looked in my mirrors to make sure I was clear to overtake and was disap­poin­ted to see one of the cars behind me had reacted quicker.

It was something quite small, low-slung. Something expens­ive. Something distinctly Aston Martin shaped.

It was quiet until it drew along­side me. I had my window open, so I got the full effect of that beauti­ful V8 howl as it exploded past. The noise made the hairs on my arms stand on end. It painted a grin across my face. Within a few seconds it was gone, that wonder­ful noise echoing across the countryside.

That alone must make up a fair amount of the enorm­ous asking price.

A bit further up the road, I changed down and overtook too. My little 1.6 VTEC Honda sounds nice enough, but it’s just not in the same league.

I know, I know. I’ve been a bad little blogger. I’ve not been keeping you amused very much of late. The truth is I’ve just fallen out of the habit of writing regularly¹ and I’ve found it diffi­cult to get myself back into the groove.

I’ve sat down umpteen times to write about something and just been completely unable to make any headway. I’ve started writing, thought “that’s complete crap” and just closed the browser. My in-built self censor­ship has got in the way a bit too: I’m quite shy by nature, so when a diffi­cult subject comes along I can find it hard to talk openly about it, even with close friends and family. The same carries through to my writing, although to a lesser extent.

It’s not like there’s been nothing for me to write about. Plenty’s happened since I last wrote anything much about my life. There’s a couple of things I want to get out there over the next few days and hopefully that’ll kick me back into blogging. We’ll see.

1. It’s not just here either — my posts on mailing lists and fora have almost completely dried up too. Some might argue that it’s a good thing ;)

Sheila² got me: The object of the game is to reveal 5 things about you, which most readers probably don’t know, then nomin­ate 5 friends to do the same.

So then, here’s five things you might not know about me:

1. My dad and I went to watch the Isle of Man TT several times on his classic bikes, includ­ing a Matchless G3LS (350cc single), an AJS 500cc twin and later a Honda CB750 (the rest of the family followed in an old VW Minibus). The Honda was my favour­ite at the time, though I look back on the 350 most fondly. The last time we went, the I.O.M. Steam Packet Company crashed one of their ferries into Douglas harbour. Joey Dunlop was a boyhood hero of mine, so seeing him win at the TT was pretty special.
2. At school we built a wall-climbing robot that got us second place in the local Young Entrepreneur of the Year award. It used compressed air and suction cups to climb up smooth surfaces. I did all the artwork — it was probably my first proper bit of design. Looking back, it was a bit rubbish. The awards were held at the old motor racing circuit at Brooklands in Surrey.
3. On the same day I had a look around the Sultan of Brunei’s old private plane which was housed there. Very plush. A few years later at college, I became friends with Steve, who comes from Brunei. The plane was still at Brooklands when I visited an Auto Italia event with Owen & Anne a couple of years ago. The three of us finally made it out there for Steve’s wedding earlier this year.
4. I’m a founder member of the Kusatado Ninja and I’ve got the bright yellow jersey to prove it. We took turns “racing” mountain bikes round in circles for 24 hours. I use the term “racing” in the loosest possible sense — we didn’t do very well, but we had a great time burning round on bikes, burning on the blazing sunshine and getting high on RedBull. Wonderful.
5. When I was a kid, we used to live right on the River Wey, in Guildford. We had a large canvas-covered canoe that my dad, my sister and I would row up and down the navig­a­tion, carry­ing it around the locks and gener­ally having a laugh. We had a big adven­ture one day after some partic­u­larly heavy rain. The current carried us for miles, we took some inter­est­ing detours through water-meadows (they take the overflow when the river floods) and nearly got dragged down the odd weir. In the end we had to phone my mum and get her to come and collect us in the minibus.

You know what? It was good fun remin­is­cing about that lot. Good times.

And with that I tag you Weon, Matt, Simon, Rich and other SimonAndy.

Man, this morning’s commute was hard work. It’s not very far, but this morning I rode out onto the Tewkesbury road into a headwind that nearly had me going backwards. I bet it’ll have swirled a full 180° by the time I come to ride home, too.

Even so, the ride always becomes more fun when I get into town. Inevitably most of the traffic gets snarled up at some point, so I can often bomb past it all. This morning it was especially good, as I traded places with a rather nice Porsche 911 several times, before eventu­ally beating it to the town centre. Winner!

Right, I’m off to get some new batter­ies for my head-light. It’s slightly discon­cert­ing when it fades away to nothing as I’m riding around a big scary roundabout…

I don’t know about you, but I thoroughly enjoyed it. It’s success­fully messed up my body clock but I don’t think I can blame anyone but myself for that…

So, I arrived in Brighton on Thursday night after a surpris­ingly trouble-free train journey. After check­ing into the hotel, I wandered up the road to Heist for the pre-conference social gather­ing. I met some new people, caught up with the usual suspects and gener­ally had a good time. We finished up at a random pub on the sea-front at about 3 a.m.

Just under five hours later, my alarm went off. I staggered downstairs where I self-served myself the biggest break­fast of all time, before wander­ing up to the Corn Exchange, venue for the confer­ence. A bit of fresh air did me the world of good, so I was feeling surpris­ingly wide awake by the time I got there. I grabbed the freebies, downed some coffee and got chatting to some more of the peeps before we were called into the auditorium.

The confer­ence itself was ace. We had talks from Jeff Barr, Simon Willison & Paul Hammond, Jeremy Keith (twice!), Aral Balkan, Derek Featherstone, Thomas Vander Wal and Jeff Veen. Various other attendees around the inter­net have dissec­ted each of the sessions so I won’t go into detail.

Obviously it wasn’t all perfect. Biggest problem for me was the lack of leg-room in the audit­or­ium. Maybe it’s just my bad knees?

The good stuff made up for that though. Aral’s “Mash my Flex up” presen­ted Flash to me in a whole new light. Derek Featherstone came up with a series of gotchas and examples of deeply inaccess­ible coding on some very high profile sites (hello Google Calendar). Finally, Jeff Veen stole the show (as per usual). It was one of his inspir­a­tional tour-de-force talks, leaving most of the audience think­ing “Yeah, this stuff is ace! Let’s go and build it, right now!”

Which of course we didn’t. After running off to drop off various laptops, bags and miscel­laneous freebies off at numer­ous hotels around Brighton, we all congreg­ated at The Terraces for the Snipperoo sponsored after-party. Alas, I missed out on the free-bar (which ran out in about ten minutes flat). That place closed somewhat earlier than billed, so a bunch of us went-a-wandering, eventu­ally ending up in Sidewinder. Again, I finally crawled into bed shortly after 3 a.m.

Just under five hours later, my alarm went off. I staggered downstairs where I self-served myself the second-biggest break­fast of all time, before check­ing out and wander­ing up to the station. After a surpris­ingly trouble-free train journey, I got home to find that I’d lost my house-keys and ended up climb­ing in a window. Utter genius. Where did they turn up? Bottom of my wash-bag. Go figure…

Of course one of the best things about the whole confer­ence was the backnet­work. I didn’t have to collect business cards from every­body I met. Instead I logged on, added them to my network (all done with XFN) et voila! I have their contact details. What’s more, it picks up people’s blog posts that mention dConstruct, along with any Flickr photos tagged with dconstruct06. Madgex, that was an inspired idea!

I looked up at her with what must have been a look of blind panic across my face. I had absolutely no idea where I was, what the hell was going on, or indeed who she was. Why is everything blurry?

Mr Hodgson? Are you OK?
Erm… wha?

I can see now. Oh, hang on. I know this place. You’re a nurse aren’t you?

Um, I think I must have passed out.

You see, about five minutes earlier, they’d taken that fetch­ing blue plaster off of my hand (mmm, yellow and smelly) and handed me a leaflet explain­ing what might happen. The first thing in there?

You may find you feel faint or nauseous — don’t be alarmed — this is because your limb has been in a cast for some time.

I wandered out into the waiting room, then almost immedi­ately got called into another room to wait for the doctor to get around to me. So I sat down to wait for a while. Next thing I know, I’m looking up at the nurse, wonder­ing what the hell was happen­ing. They moved me onto the adjacent bed and put an oxygen mask on my face.

I was feeling relat­ively normal after about ten minutes, so the doctor came back. He said it’d continue to hurt for a while (he’s right, it does) because I haven’t used it for weeks. No bat or raquet sports, pneumatic drills or power-tools for the time being. Jogging or swimming is fine though (boring!). Come back in a couple of weeks for a check-up.

I asked about mountain biking and he said I ought not to for a little while — but my commute on the road ought to be OK. That amused me, given the state of Cheltenham’s roads. I may also have neglected to mention I have a tendency to hoon off speed bumps and and down flights of stairs en-route to work. I might have a spin on the Cove tomor­row and see how it feels.

Oh, I still appear to be operat­ing left-handed. What gives?

So I went to see the fracture clinic today.

I explained to the doctor how it happened, obviously telling the whole story, because I’m start­ing to feel a bit silly every time I say “I fell off my mountain bike”. He took a look at the x-rays and frowned. “Hmmm” he said, before going to get the other doctor.

Ooooh-kaaay then. What the hell does that mean? I’ll just sit here and worry for a while then.

They returned and had a short dicus­sion before decid­ing that they didn’t need to operate after all. “We’d like to, but only because it’s more fun. These heal up perfectly well in the vast major­ity of cases.”

Phew.

So they gave me this shiny blue plaster. I go back in three weeks to have the plaster removed and a bit of physio on my fingers. Hopefully it’ll all be fine…

Later on, at work, Maxine commen­ted that it looked rather festive. Maybe I should have asked for red?

Well, my busted hand didn’t seem to be getting any better, so I took a trip down to casualty to see what they thought. Obviously I was armed with stories from friends along the lines of Oh, there isn’t much they can do, they’ll just strap your fingers together or something.

Some hours later, I emerged with a cast from my fingers most of the way up to my elbow. Great. Still, the break looked ace on the x-ray. I’ve snapped the outer­most metacarpal (I think) good and proper.

It’ll be inter­est­ing to see how I cope with work for the next few weeks. I guess I’ll have to become ambidex­trous with the mouse…