I cycled quite a lot when I was a teenager, but stopped when I came to London – my big, heavy mountain bike was a pain to haul around and it sat mouldering at the top of the stairs before I gave it away. Ten years since my cycling heyday and I decided to get back into it, buying myself a bike through the excellent Ride 2 Work scheme.

Here are some things I’ve learned from cycling to and from work. Obviously, YMMV.

1. Don’t bother with a hybrid. The problem with hybrids is that they seem so logical – particularly if you’ve been away from cycling for a few years. If you had a bike as a teenager, it was probably a big heavy lunk of a thing made by Raleigh, and designed to be knocked around. It probably looked like a mountain bike. Problem is, if you look at mountain bikes now, well, they’re pretty much like motorbikes without the engines. Disk brakes, chunky tyres, suspension front and back, strange shaped frames – exciting stuff, but not really what you want for riding through London.

So the natural next step is a hybrid; they look like the mountain bikes of old, only on a diet. They still have the flat handle bars and a little bulk, but they’re sensible. You can ride them on and off road. It’s the best of both worlds… right?

The problem I found when researching is hybrids are invariably compromised. Some come fitted with slick tyres – so you’re not going to be able to ride off road without changing those. Then there’s the fact they’re not really that light, and don’t always come fitted with larger wheel sizes. Light bikes with big wheels go further and faster with less work from the rider.

And really, are you ever going to ride off road? I wanted a light, fast bike that I was mostly going to spend riding to and from work, or around South East London. So I bought myself a real road bike. It’s brilliant; fast, nimble and something I really look forward to riding.

2. Light bikes are great. Faster, more fun to ride, better when it comes to manoeuvring around traffic and easier to get into the house at the end of the day. If you have a choice between features such as disc brakes and features that will save weight (like a carbon fibre front fork), go for the latter.

3. Components are complex. Talk to the staff and try and work out what your options are. One of the reasons I went for my bike, which is from Fuji, a less known brand, is that it has the mid-level components (i.e. gears, brakes) of a Specialized or Trek, but for a couple of hundred quid less.

4. Good locks are heavy, necessary and only as good as your locking technique. Once you’ve bought one, learn how to lock your bike properly – I have a D-lock and a cable for when it’s left in public, as both wheels are quick release. Ideally you want to have the lock going through the back wheel, the frame and a very well anchored object, and then you can use the cable to tie in the front wheel.

5. Cycling clothing is expensive, and often just because it says “for cycling” on the label. I’ve got a couple of these Berghaus tech t-shirts, which are great for the British summer – ludicrously quick drying (as in, they’re almost dry when they come out of the machine), good visibility and warmer than you’d think for a single layer. At £28 they’re cheap compared to “proper” cycling jerseys.

6. If it says Bianchi – especially on your pants – it probably means you’re trying too hard.

Here’s a bit about the project:

“The aim is to create and publicise a historical record of history teaching as it has developed over the past century in English state schools. We’re looking at what history was actually taught and how ‘what history was taught’ changed and why, as well as how the experience and expectations of history teachers and students changed over time…

There has been no previous attempt to consider the development of history teaching across the twentieth century in the context of national and regional policy together with the ‘lived experience’ of those in the classroom. It is intended to publish the results of the Project for a range of audiences, both academic and ‘popular’, via printed and electronic means and also to create resources for use within the classroom.”

She’s looking for people who studied history at state schools in England to fill in the survey. You can grab it at the link below – if you fill it in, please return it to the email address at the bottom of the file. Thanks for your help!

Download the survey.

[1] Learning, that is. After the MA, she moved out of halls and bought a house.

I’m in Austin, Texas for the next few days for South by Southwest interactive. The sky is blue, I had a a burger for breakfast and there were weathered muscle cars in the hotel parking lot. Texas, folks, is true.

“Inspired by Mayor John Bickerstaffe’s visit to the Eiffel Tower in 1889, it survived a fire at the top eight years later and was largely rebuilt in 1921-4 because cheapskate owners had failed to use rust-proof paint. Mistaken for a lighthouse, it lured the Norwegian barque Abana ashore in 1894. With good binoculars, her fragmentary remains at low tide off Little Bispham form part of the middle-distance view.”

Previous posts on Blackpool on The Wired Jester.

A map.

Because maps are paper, too.

Plus, it would be a nice way to refer back to my sabbatical trip in the autumn to China – the Jesteress came with me for the first few days, and then had to return to the UK for work. I bought a large map of China, and wrapped her presents in it, trying to take care to leave some of the locations we’d visited together visible. Worked very well, the paper was easy to fold, and a £6 map covered all the presents.

All that remains is for me to say Happy Christmas, and thanks for reading and for your comments – 2009 has been a successful one for this blog, and I think the distinction between The Wired Jester, and my personal site has been really beneficial. I hope you have a good break!

Plant portraits

Stalk of Fire. An old photo that I rescued from a dusty folder on the hard disk to brighten up a dull winter day. Taken an August ago, in the gardens of one of South East London’s best days out, Eltham Palace.

Nature will find a way. Close up of an abandoned WW2 tank on Peleliu. I think it made a nice memorial; nature is reclaiming it. The full story on my trip to Peleliu is here.

Engine lichen. Another shot from Peleliu, this time of lichen-spotted machinery in the engine bay of an old landing craft.

Garden views

A path winds through the grounds of Wuhou temple in Chengdu, the capital of Sichuan province, China.

Reflections of the garden in a cup of tea at the teahouse in Wenshu temple, Chengdu. The city’s temple teahouses are full of people reading the papers, chatting and playing cards and relaxing on rickety bamboo furniture over endlessly refilled cups of tea. As a tourist they’re a perfect experience; everything from the colours to the smells feels right. The only strange thing is that most of the Chinese there are old. The kids are all in KFC or Starbucks.

I ended up on Peleliu more by accident than design; I have family living on Palau, so my partner and I went to visit, and Peleliu seemed like an interesting day trip. I took the photos, wrote up the guide’s stories and did some Googling when I got back. One of the nice things about a blog post getting wider circulation, as mine on the Battle of Peleliu did thanks to Boing Boing, is that you get input from a huge variety of people.

Firstly, from the (very kind) comments here and over at BB, one book recommendation comes through very clearly – With The Old Breed by Eugene Sledge, so I’ve added that to my Amazon wishlist. First published in 1981, Sledge fought on Peleliu and in numerous other battles in the Pacific war. It’s very highly thought of, and it doesn’t flinch from depicting the brutality of the war. Paul Fussell, who himself wrote a brilliant book called ‘The Great War and Modern Memory’, praised it as ‘one of the finest memoirs to emerge from any war,’ which is about as good a recommendation as you can get.

With The Old Breed is, together, with another WW2 memoir, Helmet For My Pillow, being used as the source material for an HBO series about the battles across the Pacific. Called ‘The Pacific,’ it’s being produced by the same team (Spielberg, Tom Hanks etc) as the brilliant Band of Brothers, and will be on TV at some point this year. This site has a few YouTube snippets.

Also recommended was Ken Burns’ The War – I suspect this is fairly famous in the US, but this is the first I’ve heard of it. It’s easy to get on DVD though, so I’ll hopefully get a chance to watch it.

One commenter on Boing Boing wanted to know about the Japanese tank I photographed; another identified it as a Type 95 Ha-Go, and Wikipedia does indeed claim 15 were deployed on Peleliu.

Another added a link to a Flickr user with some shots of cleaning up unexploded WW2 ordinance in the Marshall Islands – this set in particular is well annotated.

A search on Metafilter revealed a post about American photographer James Fee. His father fought on Peleliu, and in 1998 James went back to the island to take photos. The exhibition he created combined his own images with shots is father had taken. You can see 18 of the images here and the book is available on Amazon. The picture of the Zero at the top of the post is his. It’s always interesting to see the approach other photographers take to the same subject matter. I’m definitely jealous of his Zero shot; it’s terrifically moody. I’m surprised by how different his images seem to mine; they’re hazier, more lyrical – he seems more wary of the colours, of the brightness of the sunlight that I was.

Finally, someone asked what I used on Peleliu – it was a Nikon D40 with the 18-55 kit lens, and for some of the shots, an 85mm f1.8 prime. It doesn’t auto-focus on the D40, but it really isn’t a problem when you’ve got such bright sunlight, and such still scenes to shoot. I’ve written about my love for this camera quite a bit; honestly, some of the best money I ever spent. I’m glad people appreciated the pictures.

Blue wasn’t always the colour.

Between September and November 1944, it was the site of an incredibly fierce battle between US and Japanese armed forces. Peleliu island is about 14 square miles of terrain; during the three months of fighting, the casualty rate worked out at just under 1,000 men killed per square mile of island. Close to 1,800 American servicemen died; of the 11,000 Japanese soldiers defending the island, only 202 were captured alive.

The battle was fought over the fact Peleliu had an airfield, and was within range of the Philippines, from where the US planned to eventually launch strikes against the Japanese mainland. The plan to attack Peleliu was a contentious one – not all of the US high command thought Peleliu was strategically important, and after the battle, the US found the airfield was barely operational, and posed almost no threat to US forces elsewhere in the Pacific.

I’m from the UK, and visited Palau in October 2008. I took a day trip to Peleliu with a Japanese tour group. I took some photos, and made some notes. The photos are all hosted on Flickr. You can see the images as a slideshow on Flickr, check out the full set, or read the rest of this post to see what I saw.

This shallow stretch of idyllic Pacific ocean is where US forces first landed on Peleliu; called ‘Orange beach’, the US Marines arrived here at half eight in the morning on September 15th, 1944. This map of Peleliu shows the landing beaches quite clearly, all grouped together at the south of the island, near the Japanese airfield.

Unlike previous battles in the Pacific, the Japanese opted not to put all their effort into defending the perimeter of the island, so while the marines faced resistance when they landed, it was only going to get worse when they advanced into the island’s interior. Below is a picture from Google’s archive of images from Life magazine which shows what it was like for the US forces approaching Peleliu. Here’s how Time Magazine’s Robert Martin described it:

‘Peleliu is a horrible place. The heat is stifling and rain falls intermittently — the muggy rain that brings no relief, only greater misery. The coral rocks soak up the heat during the day and it is only slightly cooler at night… Peleliu is incomparably worse than Guam in its bloodiness, terror, climate and the incomprehensible tenacity of the Japs. For sheer brutality and fatigue, I think it surpasses anything yet seen in the Pacific, certainly from the standpoint of numbers of troops involved and the time taken to make the island secure.’

***

When you arrive on Peleliu, it doesn’t take long to start spotting the remains of the war. This is partly because while the US helped rebuild Peleliu (and Palau as a whole – the country only become fully independent in 1994), they just moved the civilian population from the south of the island to the north and started afresh. The south of the island and its thick jungle still contain plenty of WW2 relics.

While the Japanese tactics were different to the ones they had used previously, the US relied on a similar approach to previous Pacific island battles, pounding Peleliu with tonnes of heavy shells fired from battleships before landing troops. They were confident they had destroyed most of the Japanese garrison and that when the Marines landed there would be little resistance.

Despite the damage done to the island (seen above, in another image from Life), the Japanese troops survived by sheltering in their caves. When the marines landed, they found Peleliu extremely tough going – no surprises when they were being shot at from well concealed sniper positions such as this one.

Like the rest of the Palau islands, Peleliu is made mostly from extremely tough volcanic limestone. Its toughness made it ideal for turning into defensive fortifications, and once stripped of its vegetation, it was razor sharp on the feet and extremely hostile to navigate.

Unlike previous battles in the Pacific, the Japanese didn’t place the entire emphasis of their strategy on defending the beaches – they fortified the island, in particular a mountain called Umurbrogol. The Japanese riddled Umurbrogol with a huge network of caves and tunnels from which to operate (this image shows a plan of one complex). Once they had completed their work, they evacuated the civilians, and waited for the Americans.

Below you scan see the entrance to one of the Japanese caves, and beneath that, a shot from inside, looking back to the entrance. The entrance itself probably isn’t more than 3 or 4 foot high; inside the cave ceilings are slightly higher, although very uneven – but it’s not a great place to be when, like me, you’re 6 foot 2. It was a horrible place to spend 15 minutes, but caves like these were where the Japanese forces lived for the duration of the battle. Inside, you can still see discarded boots, bottles and bullets.

Peleliu has several Japanese graveyards/memorials, of which this is one. If I remember rightly, this shrine was built by a Japanese soldier who survived the battle (one of only 200 of the original garrison of 11,000 who did), who then went on to become a successful businessman running book shops in Shibuya. The man in the blue shirt on the right was our guide, Kikuchi-san.

***

Peleliu takes an hour or so to get to via boat from Koror, Palau’s capital, so while we’d set off early in the day, after seeing the landing beaches and the first set of caves, it getting towards lunch time, and really warming up. In the sun, the temperature was comfortably over 30 degrees Celsius, and once you got away from the sea, the humidity really started to rise. Everyone on the tour group clutched their bottle of chilled water and regularly took new ones from the chiller box in the back of the tour’s Toyota minivan.

Once we’d finished at the graveyard, our small group piled back into the Toyota and hit the road, throwing the windows open and glad of the breeze. Next stop: what was once the HQ of the Imperial Japanese Navy on Peleliu. A two level concrete structure built in the 1920s, it’s now a beautiful, quiet run that is gradually becoming part of the jungle. We were free to explore – even up the crumbling staircase. Spookily, it was, when we visited, decorated with brightly coloured chains of paper cranes, hanging still in both sunlight and shadow. It’s a common custom in Japan for children to make these for ceremonial occasions – and I think Kikuchi-san told us they were brought by school children on a history trip.

***

Peleliu’s climate is exhausting; hot and humid, it pulls the energy out of you. The suffering of the soldiers – both Japanese and US – from combat was compounded by the climate. It also exacts a real toll on buildings and equipment, as you can see from this shot of a concrete bunker. I’ve never seen concrete rot before:

***

Once we left the naval HQ, we drove towards Umurbrogol mountain, the site of the fiercest fighting on Peleliu. Initial aerial photos made it look to US planners like a relatively simple mountain that the Marines would have little trouble capturing. They were wrong:

“Instead of a gently rounded hill, the Umurbrogol area was in fact a complex system of sharply uplifted coral ridges, knobs, valleys, and sinkholes. It rose above the level remainder of the island from 50 to 300 feet, and provided excellent emplacements for cave and tunnel defenses.” Brigadier General Gordon D. Gayle, USMC, 1

Even now, backed up by bottles of chilled water and carrying only a few pieces of camera equipment, it’s not easy to climb. The path leads on a very circuitous route, framed on each side by steep drops, cliffs of sheer stone and thick foliage. The heat hangs in clusters, the sunlight waiting for you to pass through, baking on your skin when you do.

This huge Japanese gun remains in a hollow, looking out over the island:

While these ferns proved nature’s tenacity…

By growing in this US landing craft’s engine bay.

This Japanese tank was much smaller than the American one. Though it has been abandoned, it makes a nice memorial; nature is reclaiming it.

***

There are many memorial plaques on the mountain, some in English, some in Japanese, some in both. This one was placed outside a cave where several Japanese officers committed ritual suicide. As the Americans advanced slowly up the mountain² – taking horrendous casualties as they did, and causing the troops to name it, with typical Marine corps black humour, ‘Bloody Nose ridge’ – they resorted to using flamethrowers to clear the caves. Today, you can still see the scorch marks on the wall.

The group paused here while our guide, Kikuchi-san spoke about the battles.

As with most of the tour, it was in Japanese (which I don’t speak well), but he kindly translated for me. After Kikuchi-san had finished his talk, the Japanese on the group were silent and offered prayers to the soldiers. It was a very sad moment, and difficult to know what to think. Part of me was flattened by how useless the whole fight was – how strange that something people were willing to fight to the death for has faded in sixty years to the point that I can visit the battlefield as a tourist, on a tour with the ‘other side’ – yet you can’t help but be moved by the bravery and tenacity displayed by both sides. Perhaps what you feel most keenly on Peleliu is the passage of time; how powerful the process of the minutes moving onwards is.

This is the view from the top of Umurbrogol.

***

We also stopped briefly at the airfield that was the stated aim of the US assault on the island. Rusting nearby in the jungle was a Mitsubishi Zero fighter.

***

The battle on Peleliu became the inspiration for the phrase ‘thousand yard stare’, after the title of a painting by a war correspondent there, Tom Lea. Previously known for jingoistic, ‘Go America’ images, Peleliu altered Lea’s approach.

According to Wikipedia, Lea said about the marine who was the subject of the painting:

“He left the States 31 months ago. He was wounded in his first campaign. He has had tropical diseases. He half-sleeps at night and gouges Japs out of holes all day. Two-thirds of his company has been killed or wounded. He will return to attack this morning. How much can a human being endure?”

***

This image shows our guide, Kikuchi-san, at one of the memorials to Japanese and American soldiers. It looks out over the beautiful Pacific and blue is the colour.

¹ Taken from BLOODY BEACHES: The Marines at Peleliu, by Brigadier General Gordon D. Gayle, USMC (Ret)
² Gayle’s write up is is very detailed when it comes to the action on the mountain.

Like most journalists, I am largely fueled by coffee – to the point that I do actually have my own cafetiere in my desk drawer at work – but getting a well made coffee in a cafe. is one of life’s great pleasures. Via the blog of Lantana, a lovely new cafe near our offices, comes this link to a map of the UK showing the best places to get good coffee. It’s particularly strong on London, listing excellent places such as Flat White (where the picture was taken), Milk Bar etc.

Late afternoon, and the sunlight is drawing triangles of light and shade on the courtyard with such precision it would make a maths teacher proud. From the corner of my eye I can see thick, unruly green leaves and white curls of jasmine falling from the upper balcony. Through them, the light casts scruffy nets of shadow, scribbling lazily over the stone tiles. Beyond the courtyard, beyond the walls of this 18th century house – now a dollar-charging boutique hotel for Westerners – the streets have the same quiet, studious feel as the air. Today is Friday, holy day here in Aleppo in the north of Syria.

My mobile phone bleeps with a text message. The screen is a bright white; caustic, electronic and entirely different from the sunlight in the courtyard. Set into it are chunky black letters:

SHIT DUDE are you still out there or have they flown you out or what?

I read the message from Friend P. to my fiancee, who is reading on the bed beside me. She snaps the TV on. Every channel ripples with static.

The AV button, press the AV button. Have you texted him back? What’s he talking about?

I hammer the buttons and ping a message back. She and I stare at the TV screen, then the mobile screen. Five bars; the signal is strong. When there are revolutions, don’t the phones go down? Or maybe that was only in the old days. Cellular networks are light on infrastructure. Hip tech magazines roll out the story of African countries where mobiles outnumber landlines, because infrastructure is passée. Dealing with the real world, digging trenches for poles and wire – it’s all too much work. You need to cyber it up a notch. Especially when fashion-conscious westerners are throwing away so many good handsets. I once sat in a taxi back in London, driven by a cheerful, chatty Ghanian who told me he went back to Africa as ‘often as he liked’, because he could easily finance the plane ticket by buying cheap second hand phones here, and selling them back in Accra, because there, the UK’s second best was premium.

And so I sit, waiting for a text, with the television saying nothing, concentrating on its own thoughts. The city still sounds like it is doing the same as well. I am not good at staying calm. I am a natural worrier, prone to googling every slight ache and pain, easily convinced I have some exotic syndrome or ailment. The reaction of friend P. when I told him about my trip to Syria comes to mind:

Friend P: I’m just saying I wouldn’t go anywhere for my holidays that’s been the target of an airstrike by a US ally in the last year or so.

Of course, Syria has history with Israel (the Golan Heights and more), and it’s not really history because it’s far from over – just months before we met, the Israelis had bombed a site in the north of Syria, leading to speculation they had seen the Syrians building a nuclear reactor with help from that noted international japester, Kim Jong-Il.

I thought back to our morning in Aleppo: a trip to the citadel, 12th century stronghold agains the Crusaders. To the 7th century Umayyad mosque before that, and the guardian’s two young sons, smiling as they say next to me, shouting the names of their favourite Premiership footballers. The muezzin’s call had seemed sonorous and devout. Not angry. So what had changed? George W. Bush having one last squeeze of the trigger before the world could finally forget him? I remember reading an AP wire story in my RSS reader about a US warship chugging into position off the Syrian and Lebanese coast. And then there was that Israeli airstrike. And, and, and….

The phone beeps.

Friend P: No reason. Was plotting an OMG war wind-up but changed my mind halfway. Hope it is win out there.

It ended with a series of smiley faces and my fiancee muttered something about my stupid friends. We went back to our books and enjoying the warmth of afternoon, me feeling thoroughly foolish and guilty.

From this I learned… to be slightly less credulous, hopefully. And that the disruptive power of mobile phones is nothing compared to the embedded fears you carry in your head. As smart as you might feel back home reading up on the history and current events of the place you’re going to, there is much to be said for arriving in a new place without already knowing what you think. A couple of evenings on Wikipedia make an expert out of anyone, and a fool out of many, me included.