Just finished reading this great book - "A Mathematician Plays The Market". It's about a guy, a professor of Mathematics, who thinks that his mighty genius will allow him to beat the stock market. He figured out the odds, and he totally lost his shirt. Fantastic read, full of wry humour.

Anyway, there was this one bit I read and it's totally been doing my head in. I told The Missus about it, and it's been doing her head in too. It's an example of how accounting trickery works (think Enron), and the kind of games that Clever People play with the numbers. Goes like this:

Three people go out for a meal. The bill comes to £30. They split it 3 ways, each of them pays £10 each in cash. The Manager realises that he's overcharged them - the cost of the meal was only £25 - so he instructs the waiter to refund them £5.

The waiter, not the most honest of individuals, can't figure out how to split £5 three ways so he changes it into 5 £1 coins. He pockets two of these coins, and refunds the remaining £3 to the guys at the table.

So each of the guys at the table paid £9 for his meal - a total of £27. The waiter has £2 in his pocket. That's a grand total of £29.

But the guys handed over £30. So, the question is, what happened to the extra £1?

Shenanigans like these are the kind of thing that you need to get up to when you're trying to blag your way over borders in order to keep racing in Heroes Legend without a passport. I'll ask my ITM how it works when he gets back - he's a smart guy, he'll know the answer.

ITM-ess has been busy today. Using her girlish charm, she has somehow managed to get the Irish Department for Foreign Affairs to be logging on to the Heroes Legend website to track the progress of the rally. When she calls them to say "and he's just approaching Atar", they say "Yes, we know, isn't he doing well?". They have alerted all borders that a rather unkempt Irishman on a motorcycle will be approaching the border without a passport and would they please let him through because he has to deliver a little flat paper man to Dakar thank you very much.

Martin called this morning at about 8am. Just did it to wind me up because I was supposed to be trail riding today but couldn't make it because I had the fracture clinic. I told him this, but he still thought that it would be funny to phone me at that time - knowing full well that I'd completely freak out thinking that he was expecting me today.

We spoke about clutches. I can highly recommend talking about clutches at 8am, it's very therapeutic. Conversation went like this:

"It's dead easy to cook a clutch on a 4-stroke"

"Really?"

"Well, you should know, you cooked one the first time you were out with me"

Ahh, yes, I remember. As Martin would say - "Yeah, that one". What can I say? That I was young, and I needed the money? That, em, I didn't inhale? That I did not have clutch-cooking relations with that bike?

We spoke about engines. We spoke about the need for 250cc and then some more. Apparently, the research bods at AJP have been busy on this one - they've been shoe-horning all sorts of firepower into the PR3. They started by saying "it's got to be light", and they managed that in spades. Now they've turned the engineers loose on some sort of "and how much power can you cram in?" mission.

Oz had some very philosophical and useful advice about this. His view was that you should take a big big bike with lots of power to just beat those big-ass dunes into submission. When I protested about the amount of weight I was capable of picking up, Oz's reply was wise indeed:

"Yes, but if you ride it well enough then you power your way through, instead of just thinking 'nah, it doesnt matter if I fall cos Ive got a nice light bike'".

There's food for thought there.

Ah, the fracture clinic. The doctor was full of good news. My shoulder is healing nicely. Good. I was kind of forming that opinion myself after smacking on to it at Dawn to Dusk a few times. I am allowed to do "light exercise". That's good - just as well I have a light bike then. I asked him if I'd be able to ride a bike properly, and he assured me that I could. I was very relieved by this, because I've been trying to ride a bike properly for almost a year now ...

So, the Heroes. Working their way south through Mauritania, they passed an important milestone today. Out there in the middle of the Sahara desert, they will have absolutely no idea that they passed this milestone. It's the milestone where both my ITM and Dakar are visible on Iritrak at the scale where you can see roads and villages. When they started out, nearly 2 weeks ago, the only way that my ITM and Dakar appeared on the same map was if you could also see Norway and South Africa - now they're on the same page.

One more border to go, a little more than 1,000km and he's home. Well, he will be once ITM-ess manages to get the new passport couriered out to him. Through a lot of effort, phone calls, paperwork, forms and sheer bloody-mindedness, she's managed to get the Irish Embassy to produce the relevant travel paperwork for him to come home proper.

Just a couple of more sandy pimples, nice little trail ride in the sunshine - maybe stop for an ice-cream and do a spot of sunbathing. Em, not quite. Over 1,000km in blistering heat, over the top of talcum-powder covered dunes the height of Wales. With a bike leaking oil, a battered and bruised body and - no doubt - a fairly chronic dose of Monkey Butt.

To Dakar. Where Flat Stanley gets his pictures taken and then gets posted back to an expectant ITM-ette. And all because, the little lady loves, Daddy keeping his promises.

He'll come home to a Heroes welcome, and he'll be choc full of tales and Legends. I suppose that the major clue of the rally is in the name. Much easier to figure out than the missing £1.

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