The Rules

Went down to the University today, to talk about some work that they need doing - to kick off in the new year - writing a bit of software. I can do that.

The professor I was speaking to is Belgian. He was asking all about my accident, and my Dakar hopes. Funny thing is that Paris-Dakar is not a big deal in the UK, but it is a massive deal in French-speaking countries. He not only knew about Paris-Dakar, he also knew about Thierry Sabine and the like. Once we had finished talking about bikes, we talked about bizz-ness and computer stuff.

So here's me, no degree, talking about computer stuff and technology with a University Professor, and the ways in which I could solve the problems they've got.

I was watching a video on Google last night about Enron and what happened there:



This kind of stuff interests me. I like Economics, and I am cynical. The wheeling and dealing that goes on at the bottom - it's exactly the same as the wheeling and dealing that goes on at the top - only the numbers are different.

If you recall, Enron went completely belly-up in 2002 and produced a massive scandal of fraud and wrongdoing. Everybody was in on it - the Banks, the Accountants, the Lawyers - the whole lot. As long as they were making money - lots of it - everybody looked the other way.

The guy at the head of Enron was a colourful character by the name of Jeff Skilling. Unlike a lot of Fortune 500 Company executives, he rode motocross in his spare time. At one point, he took a bunch of the Enron board of Directors on the Baja 1000 rally in Mexico - all 1,200 miles of it - on motorcycles.

Reporting to him was his chief deal-maker - a guy by the name of Cliff Baxter. Super-intelligent, and manic depressive, he shot himself after the scandal broke.

Jeff Skilling was described as "incandescently brilliant", at the same time as being described as "flawed". He applied to Harvard University and turned up for an interview. The interview famously went like this:

Professor: Are you smart?

Skilling: No. I'm fucking smart.

He got into Harvard and graduated top of his class. He then took that arrogance, that brilliance, and put it to work at Enron.

The first thing he did - a condition of him taking the job at all - was to use an accounting technique called "Mark to Market". Sounds complicated huh? Really though, it's as simple as this:

You and I agree a deal. We agree that at some point in the future (say 10 years from now) you will buy a widget from me, and you will pay a billion groats for it. What Mark-to-market allows me to do is to put a million groats on my books today - even though the money won't change hands until ten years from now.

and that's it. Nothing more complicated than that. In other words a deal was worth, well, whatever Enron said it was worth.

Imagine that for a second. You could make the profits of your company whatever you wanted them to be. Since our share price is related to your profits, you could make the share price whatever you wanted it to be.

You give yourself a million share options - priced at (say) 1 dollar per share. You then manipulate the profits until the share price is $201, then you sell your shares. You just made $200 million. Nice work if you can get it. This is what Skilling - and others - did.

Skilling, brilliant though he may be, is currently serving 24 years in jail. He'll be out when he is 78 years old.

The thing is, I have to admire the guy. My ageing friend and I disagree on this. He is of the opinion that you cannot admire somebody who does things which are plain wrong. My argument is that I don't admire what he did - I admire the brilliance with which he did it. Let me explain.

Skilling knew the rules - the rules of the Market and the rules of business. He played within those rules, using the mechanisms provided by these rules, and managed to do something completely and utterly wrong. But he did it according to the rules. And that was his brilliance. If he was a lawyer, they'd have named a loophole after him (apologies to my ITM for the theft of that phrase).

Everybody who had their hand in the till, they were all looking the other way. Nobody asked too many questions because, if they did, then the answers would cause the gravy train to hit the buffers. When it finally did hit the buffers, everybody took the "if we had known what was going on, we would never have done ..." defence.

Mr Happy was back in to the outsourcer today to do another presentation. We did two, so they should be allowed to do two. This makes it "fair". Those are the rules.

Here's the problem. We have the better solution, but Mr Happy is a "less risk" option. They've been in bizz-ness for longer, and they have done bizz-ness with the outsourcer before. They are friends with people high up in the outsourcer. We, on the other hand, are relying on peoples' sense of fair play and their desire to get the best job done. Like that ever mattered - it's all about who you know, and who your friends are.

That said, we still cracked open the champagne last night when my ageing friend came over with his Missus. When you consider how far we have come, and how we have turned a sure thing for Mr Happy into a two-horse race, we deserve it. All of the late nights, the hours of coding, the proposals written whilst propped up on morphine in a hospital bed, the one-handed typing. We deserve it.

I am expecting a front brake assemble through the post from Martin. When it arrives, my ageing friend is forbidden from touching it - he has form.

So I'm starting to get a little nervous about having no work on the books. Sure, I need the time to complete the software I've been working on for years but I also need a job. Decision is on Monday - please do wish us luck.

Remember You're a Dongle

Up to Swindon today, to meet with the outsourcer. My ageing friend drove, me in the passenger seat frantically trying to (a) keep my laptop steady and (b) finish off the presentation we were about to do. It's all about laying the track right in front of the train.

They had more questions, we were told. We suggested a face-to-face, rather than email back and forward, and they agreed. This is a good sign. We spent three hours with them - whiteboards, easels and laptops - and everybody got on fine.

There are three parts to a computer:

• CPU
  How fast it can process things
  
  
• Memory
  How much it can remember
  
  
• I/O
  How well it interacts with the outside world

The standing (good-humoured) joke at the global Bank is that I was a bit of a shit computer. Brilliant CPU, fantastic memory, but really crap I/O since I could be a bit stroppy at times.

What you do with computers to improve their I/O is to add a thing called a dongle. This is a wee plug that allows it to talk to more stuff - a wireless network for instance.

So here we are stood outside with a couple of folks, and the one who coined the shit I/O joke was there. He looks exactly like an overweight TinTin would look if he had black hair. So he refers to my ageing friend as "a dongle" - something to improve my ability to interact with the outside world. He'll never know how accurate he was. He has just found out his Missus is expecting. Congratulations - they been trying for a while.

The outsourcer will make a decision by the end of the week. This is a good sign - if there were only 1 horse in the race, then we'd already have had the answer "No". Maybe we could look on the glass as half-full.

My Nautical friend has reached Durban - right at the arse end of Africa - after finishing leg 2 of the round the world yacht race. Only 10 months to go. You can catch up yourself at www.sailorv.co.uk.

Spoke to Martin at AJP. He has been mental busy since the launch of the PR3 (did I ever mention that she weighed 89kg?). He's sold a couple already, the article in Trail Bike Magazine really got people's attention. He reckons that he's found a company in America that provide a ready-built fully race spec Honda XR 200 engine - same engine as Madge - that kicks out twice the power.

Pop that in the PR3 and you will have something faster than a 2-stroke with even less weight. Fuel-efficient, top speed probably 90+, and almost light enough to carry. Add fuel tanks, electrics and stuff like that, you're probably just over 100kg, and you've got a range of about 300 miles or so - well plenty for a Dakar special.

This years route is now published. The stages are slightly shorter than previous years, but there are many more dune sets (they look good on TV). Normally, the route (and the roadbook) is set for cars - not bikes. This basically means that you need bike with the same kind of travelling capabilities as a car - one of the reasons why there are so many big bikes in Dakar.

This year, for the first time, the bikes take a different route - one especially plotted for bikes. This will not only mean less dead bikers (not being run over by cars) but it also means that there is much more terrain that only bikes can go on (narrow trails for instance). There are also more fuel stops. These two things combined means that you need less fuel, and you'll get away with a smaller bike.

Think about that for a second. The entries closed in June. You pay 10 grand to enter a race and you have no idea the route you will be taking.

My bet is that you'll start to see an awful lot smaller bikes in Dakar from now on. Mine will be one of them, but we need to pour some cold water on the current ove affair between my ITM and the KTM 525. There has been an awful lot of people hitting my site searching for "AJP PR3 Dakar" - maybe Martin and I are not the only people who think it can be done.

There is the Tunisia Rally in March, which I am planning to be fit for. Things going according to plan, I should have shaken down the PR3 by then - hopefully with the new race engine - and she'll have proven herself worthy.

An awful lot happening at AJP too - Martin is setting up his own 3-day rally in Wales later in the year, which will be a good shakedown for the bike.

My mobility is getting better. I had my dressing changed today, and everything is healing nicely - lovely scar. My hip still feels like I've been kicked by a mule, and my arm is still in the sling, but it's getting easier to move around and, crucially, no morphine.

Have a lot of time to think right now - perhaps a little too much. Being up on blocks is a nightmare - you can't do anything. I am working in the stuff for the outsourcer, but this one-handed typing is doing my head in.

Been thinking about fitness and stuff. I can't really exercise just now, and can't get any bike time, this will probably run till the end of the year. It's actually not a bad time of year to break a bone really - there's not many enduros going on.

It is now 400 days until my own planned Dakar start line. The big question for me right now is whether or not I can get my fitness, and bike skills, tip-top for 2009.

There is also the confidence hurdle to get over. Last time I was on a bike, I did myself in pretty badly. This is bond to give me the willies when I come to getting back on a bike. Something to overcome - but I'm definitely aware of it. You start to question yourself - "is somebody trying to tell me something?", or "am I really cut out for this?". I mean, I am itching to get back on the bike, but I am also - understandably I think - a little bit scared too.

Then you think about adversity in general, and what it means. It's just an obstacle. An obstacle is something that gets in the way of your goals. Clearing obstacles is a way of measuring progress.

One of the guys in Swindon asked me if I had had a good think about whether or not I am actually cut out for this whole thing. I told him that I had, and that I was doing it anyway.

Let's take that logic a little further. You try something, screw up, and then give up - you're obviously not meant to be doing it.

I remember when the Wee Yin was learning to walk. She'd get up on her feet, take a few steps, nd fall flat on her face - sometimes really hurting herself in the process. Tears. Wails. Screams. Few minutes later, she's at it again.

Now, does that sound like reasonable behaviour? Surely it's more reasonable to sit her down and say "Look, about this whole walking thing. I'm not sure that you're really made for it - perhaps you should just crawl around where you'll be nice and safe". That would obviously be silly.

Why is me riding an offroad bike any different from the Wee Yin learning to walk? Apart from the obvious addition of a bike. And that I'm older. Still the same thing.

A guy in the 19th century USA, name of Colonel Drake, was one of the best oil drillers of his day. Back in 1859, he was trying to put together a venture He assembled the very best drillers, quarrymen and engineers to tell them of his plan. He wanted to drill. Drill for oil.

They though he was a madman - "Drill for oil? You mean drill into the ground to try and find oil? You're crazy". As I say, he went on to become the number 1 oil driller of his day. Not bad for a madman.

If there is a way, I'll find a way. If there isn't a way, I'll make a way - shit scared of going back on the bike or not.

Eureka!

A new wreath, made out of solid Gold, had been fashioned for King Hiero II, and a physicist by the name of Archimedes was asked to determine if it was pure gold.

How to do this without damaging the wreath? Archimedes pondered and wondered. It was a tricky problem. Then, as he got into his bath one day, he jumped up and shouted "EUREKA!" (I've found it!).

What Archimedes had realised that solid object displace water. When you get into the bath, the water level will rise, when you get out it will fall. All he had to do was measure how much water was displaced by an ounce of pure gold, and then he'd know how much water would be displaced by the wreath - if it was pur gold - since he knew its weight.

So the birthing hour arrived. It was a boy, and I named it "Mr Happy". He opted to leave home at an early stage, and go seek his fortune in the sewers and water treatment plants.

Even though I felt like jumping up and shouting Eureka!, I resisted the temptation. But what a relief. That will allow the rest of the jam to clear - I am expecting twins or possibly even more.

I can tell you what though. Even though "Mr Happy" displaced a lot of water, he wasn't gold. If only ...

In Labour

Sometimes my blog entries are full of shit. This one certainly is, as will become clear.

I'm not saying that my ageing friend is a hard taskmaster. I'll let you make up your own mind on that one.

Picture the scene. Tuesday night in Winchester hospital, visiting time. It's the day before our big big presentation to the outsourcer - a presentation we have been trying to get for months and months. I cannot attend, and tjis is now confirmed.

I am in bed, dressed in the same gown I had surgery in - still covered in blood and that yellow stuff they paint you with. Connected to my litle R2D2 morphine machine, which bleeps obligingly as it dispenses the evil (but most most welcome) painkiller directly into my vein. It is calibrated to make sure that it will only dispense 1mg of morphine every 5 minutes, and this seems to have trained my brain into subconsciously counting 301 seconds - so I know that when I press the button again, I'll get another dose.

A conversation with the pain specialist was interesting:

"On a scale of 1 to 5 - how is your pain?"

"I don't know"

"What do you mean, you don't know?"

"I haven't a clue - I am completely wasted on this morphine. I don't even know my name"

On reflection, this may have added to the pressing need to get me off the machine. But, see blogs passim, I wasn't about to give up my only means of controlling the pain - the alternative was waiting for over an hour for a nurse to bring me some paracetemol.

So, in comes my ageing friend - all caring and concerned. He arrived before The Missus did, and we chatted for a couple of minutes about how I was and the like. Always the optimist, I told him I was fine. "OK, so would you be able to have a look at this then?", and he promptly produced a USB stick from his pocket - the USB stick containing the next days presentation in glorious PowerPoint.

The laptop was duly produced, and we went through the presentation.

I had two shots of morphine last night, to get me over the worst of the pain, and managed to get a reasonable night's sleep. Good to be back in my own bed. The human body is a wonderful thing (especially the half of the species that are female bodies - particularly wonderful, and The Missus is a prime example) and sleep is it's natural medicine. Throughout history, there is no medical situation which has been made worse because of a good night's sleep.

Some more Co-Codamol this morning when I woke up, and I even managed to wander around for long enough to bring a rather exhausted and well-deserving Missus a cup of coffee in bed.

Thing about Co-Codamol (Codeine and Paracetemol) is that it's not that strong as a painkiller. It can take the edge off it, but doesn't actually take it away. It can also floor you for an hour, meaning that a lie-down is necessary. I went back to bed and slept till about 11:00. When I woke up, I've had no painkillers since. It's still sore, but I want to manage without them. In and of themselves, they have no healing properties - they can actually slow things up. Also, they have side-effects.

I always read the label on medication. I make it my business to know what I am taking and - particularly - what the side-effects may be. Interestingly enough, the morphine label doesn't list the side effects. I have to wonder - is this because there are none, or is it because if you are in enough pain to take morphine then you probably don't care what they are.

So, the major side effect of Co-Codamol is constipation. Not just any old constipation either - really evil constipation. I even asked The Missus to phone Honda, and speak to their R&D department - I may well have discovered a 100% natural and environmentally friendly method for achieving 100% compression in a sealed chamber.

Constipation is nothing more complicated than dehydration. As food is passed through the digestive tract, nutrients are removed from it and enter the body. Water is absorbed by it, to make sure that what you end up with is something which can be passed through the intestine and into the bowel. If it does not absorb enough water, then it becomes rock-like and dry - the bowels then cannot move it properly.

Laxatives operate by attracting more water to the gut, softening the contents, and creating something soft which the bowel can move. This is why taking too many laxatives will give you diahorrhea - too much water gets absorbed.

So, you can imagine a situation like the one I have right now. Everything upstream in the digestive tract is liquid, and it is blocked at the other end by a fairly solid, dried-out lump of granite.

Back to the doctor today, we need something to help out here. My ageing friend took me. Sat in the doctor's waiting room, he produces a notepad and pen, and starts working through some of the questions from yesterday's proposal (which he did on his own). I was actually finishing one of the answers which walking with the doctor into the surgery, him taking notes as my voice faded along the corridor.

The doctor decides we need to tackle this problem at both ends, as it were. Osmotic laxatives (water-absorbing) to get more water into the gut, and suppositories at the other end to help get some water in at that end. Lovely.

My ageing friend took me to the chemist, waited outside (putting in a phone call to the outsourcer whilst he waited) and I emerged with a rather large paper bag. My ageing friend then started cracking jokes about how "that will never fit" and the like.

On the upside, we are collecting a rather amusing set of anecdotes for the future. When somebody, someday, decides to write a book on the success story of our Company, then they will have some rather unbelievable stories about presentations worked in in surgical hospital wards, whiteboard sessions with broken collarbones, and demonstration software created on a laptop whilst straining on the toilet - experiencing something closely resembling childbirth. You couldn't make it up.

Moving around a lot better though - an awful lot of this is due to good sleep. At this rate, I'll be back on the bike in a week.

The electricity man came to read the meter. One look at me and he asked "collarbone?". Asked if it was bike-related (the two AJPs in the garage being a bit of a clue), then went on to tell me his own tale of misery, carnage and snapped clavicles in Dusseldorf in Germany. My ageing friend calls it the "Motorcycle Masons". I call it "connecting with people".

Big decision on Monday - the outsourcer from Del Monte will - hopefully - say "yes" to our proposal. It is years ahead of the competition (Mr Happy in this case), and probably 3 or 4 years ahead of its time.

Unlike previous occasions where I have been 3 or 4 years ahead of my time though, this is different. I am not alone. I am surrounded by people who work all day and all night, through sickness and injury, because they are passionate. No bullying, cajoling, persuading or ordering around. It is this level of dedication that is required to build a successful Company. It does not guarantee success, but not having it will guarantee failure.

I will keep you posted as things happen.

I will also let you know the weight and sex of the baby when it arrives.

The Agency Problem

I am writing this very slowly indeed, so please bear with me if it's taking too long. An awful lot has happened since Monday, let me go through it step by step.

Monday started off very busy indeed. Doctor after doctor came and examined me, asked me how I had the accident, where it was sore etc. Then, crucially, sign the consent form(s) for the various procedures. All of the doctors are first-name people. There's Simon, the junior doctor who only started working about 4 years ago. Charlie, the House Officer, who hopes to make Registrar in a few years. I don't actually get to meet the Consultant who will actually be doing the operation - a very very experienced orthopaedic surgeon called Mr Fox.

Ben, the baby faced anaesthetist, tells me about whats involved in surgery. Since I've never had surgery before, he takes his time and goes into a lot of detail. He explains how the anaesthetic works, how they bring me round again, the various people on standby just in case, all of that stuff. He then tops it off with a Martin-esque "You'll be fine".

Time to go, I kiss The Missus goodbye and walk down to theatre. I am wheeled into the anaesthetists area, where baby-faced Ben and his jolly colleague Charlene are filling up and arranging an impressive display of hypodermics and needles. I don't like needles, and seeing more of them than on the floor of a pine forest puts the willies up me.

Ben gives me a sharp scratch whilst he puts the canula (small rubber tube) in. He then tells me that he is "putting me to sleep ... now".

The next thing I know, I am in agony and screaming. I have just woken up in recovery. Baby-faced Ben starts plugging me with morphine and hooks me up to a morphine pump which will deliver morphine straight into the vein every time I press the button.

Back upstairs to the ward, pressing this little button like mad - god it hurts. What they've done is:

• opened me up
  
• dislocated and reset the shoulder
  
• pushed everything back to where it should be
  
• joined the shards of collar bone together
  
• took a bone graft from my hip to provide cement for the bone
  
• put four screws in the surrounding bone
  
• wrapped everything up in a nice shiny titanium plate

then stitched everything back together again - I don't know how many stitches but the scar is about 8 inches long.

Theres a big hole in my side where they used something like an apple corer to take out some bone from my hip to use for grafting.

Sleeping is a nightmare, and I am in a lot of pain. My little R2D2 morphine machine bleeps away and keeps me pain-free though.

Medically, injury-wise, the doctors are happy. The procedure went well. My shoulder is back in place now. They are not alarmed by the fact that I am in an awful lot of pain - they expect it after the kicking they gave my shoulder getting it back together.

The nice doctor knew I wanted to be home rather than in hospital, so he prescribed something to help me sleep. Sleeping properly is very important in keeping bipolar bouts at bay.

When I asked for this medication, I got the agency problem right in front of my eyes. Not only that, I saw a power struggle played out. I had heard of it happening, but never experienced it.

Hospitals are like the Army - there is a very strict chain of command. Not only that, there are two chains of command, two reporting structures:

• the doctors
  These guys are effectively the officer corps
  
• the nurses
  These guys are effectively the enlisted troops

Now here's what I've heard but never experienced till now. I have heard of staff nurses being in their job for 20 years and they obviously become good at it. A new junior doctor comes along, just out of university, and starts ordering the staff nurses around. He's maybe half their age and has little or no clinical experience. He also, in the nurses view, doesn't have respect for their 20-odd years of experience on the ward.

You have to kind of see the nurses point huh?

How about this though - here's a more tricky one. The doctor prescribes medication. This is an order. This is what the doctor wants to happen. The medication is one that the nurse "doesn't like". She doesn't like dispensing it. She spends a half hour calling all over the hospital, speaking to anaethatist after anaethatist asking the same question - "I'm not happy about dispensing drug XYZ with drug ABC. Is it OK to take both?". The anaethatist asks a few questions of their own, to do with medical condition andthe like, and indicates that these two drugs are fine to take. This happens 4 times. The fifth anaethatist, bingo. This anaethatist agrees that, ideally, you don't want to mix those two.

The nurse, her arse now covered, explains to me that she won't give me the medication because the anaethatist thinks its a bad idea. She didn't know that I had heard all 5 phone calls.

The doctor also asked that my dressing be changed - this one was all clogged up witrh blood and nasty stuff. The nurse "knew" that the Consultant - Mr Fox - doesn't like dressings to be changed, so she could just safely ignore the request to change the dressing.

This is nothing more than a power struggle. It is a defiant nurse, very experienced, who obviously feels that she isnot getting the respect she deserves from a junior doctor. These two need to sort it out - it is going to run and run and run.

I didn't want to give up my little machine. When you consider the above, and the fact that I have been waiting 2 hours (still waiting) for painkillers, then why would I want to lose the ability to deal with my own pain without needing somebody to do me a favour - which they may be too busy to do?

Waiting on drugs to take home, and then I can leave and go home and rest. Shoulder is killing me. Pain relief is going to be an issue I think. They "don't like" to give you painkillers that are too strong.

Looking forward to getting home. Getting back into our own bed, cuddling The Missus, being annoyed by the Wee Yin in the middle of the night. Even looking forward to walking the crap dog. I hate hospitals.

As Martin would say - "don't fall off then".

The Pony Express

In 1860, in the US, it took months for a letter to be delivered from the Atlantic Coast to the Pacific Coast. It could happen in less time, but nobody was really sure if the stagecoach was able to make the journey in Winter.

Apart from that, stagecoaches couldn't outrun Sioux Indians on horseback. What they would do to defend themselves was to have somebody travelling beside the driver, and the guy would have a shotgun to, em, deter Indian attack. This where the phrase "riding shotgun" came from.

A guy called Benjamin Franklin Ficklin had a slightly different idea. What if, he reckoned, what if it were possible to run from the East to the West coast all year round? What if it were possible to run horses at full gallop, instead of stagecoaches?

He had this idea of relay stations - every 10 miles along the route - where riders could change horses. Instead of making it big, make it big from lots of small parts. This meant that the rider would always be riding a horse at full gallop. He would carry a mail sack, a revolver, and water - nothing else. The horses would be small - about 14 hands high - no bigger than ponies. The Pony Express was born.

There is controversy about who was actually the first Pony Express rider. What is not in doubt, is that on April 14 1860 - less than 11 days after leaving St. Joseph Missouri, the first Pony Express arrived in San Francisco.

This approach to bizz-ness - doing something that has never been done before, but doing it in an uncomplicated way involving making it big from small parts, has occupied a lot of my time since coming back from Morocco. It is the basis of a proposal we are putting together for the outsourcer.

So today, my ageing friend, myself and Jolly Ollie spent a day in front of the whiteboard working on our proposal. Me in a sling, my ageing friend sat on his arse on the floor and Jolly Ollie hammering away on the laptop. About 11 hours we were at it.

My ageing friend was looking for a nice strap line: "Choose us because ...". I wanted him to put in "because we work through shattered collar bones whilst being out of it on morphine" but he didn't think that this was a good selling point.

There were two slots on Tuesday for presenting the proposals - one in the morning, one in the afternoon. Mr Happy bagged the afternoon slot - like all sales people, they wanted to pitch last. We told the outsourcer about my operation on Monday, and that I may not yet be out of hospital by Tuesday, and they gave us a slot on Wednesday instead - without us even asking for it. That'll be Fate deciding that she wants us to pitch last then.

If we nail this, it will be a small miracle - albeit a well-deserved and had fought for miracle. We have the best solution by far, and probably the cheapest, but we are competing with people who wear sharp suits and who talk a good game.

Going for my operation on Monday, I'd rather have a chain-smoking doctor who is shit hot, than some snappy-dressing dolly magnet who is really not that good. Hopefully the outsourcer will have a similar view.

My ITM sent me some pics of Morocco - which I'll get posted up here. Billy sent a great picture of himself decked out as Mother Theresa, at the same time as sending a nice picture of the crack of Oz's buttocks - builder style. Brought a smile to my face.

I'm kind of worred about the operation on Monday - never having had an operation before. There's a million things that can go wrong apparently (there always is) but if you sepnt your life thinking about this stuff then you'd never get out of bed. It just needs to be done - there is no way that this bone is going to heal by itself. Thank you for your messages of support and stuff.

So, into hospital on Monday. Operation. Out Tuesday. Recover. Putthe suit on, and go and pitch for a 6-figure piece of work on Wednesday, complete with steel pins in my shoulder. You couldn't make it up. I am doing the presenting - and am under strict instruction to keep it serious - no jokes. And I was going to tell my favourite one about the hooker with dysentery. It'll have to wait. I will open with "No comments about Barry Sheene or Metal Mickey please" and take it from there.

The Pony Express always got through. So will we.

The Collarbone Fairy

The Wee Yin's tooth fell out the other night. She put it under her pillow, and the Tooth Fairy came during the night. Unfortunately, or not, the Tooth Fairy didn't have any change and was unable to drive (smashed collarbone) so the Wee Yin ended up getting a tenner under her pillow.

The realy funny thing is that my ITM's Wee Yin lost a tooth on the same day. The Irish Tooth Fairy didn't have any change either, so my ITM's Wee Yin also got a tenner. Spooky.

I got a PayPal donation today from the CollarBone Fairy - I must have left the bone under my PayPal pillow. Thank You. You know who you are.

Back to the Doctor yesterday to get serious pain relief. This was, eventually, provided in the form of a bottle of morphine, to be taken every 4 hours. I have the fracture clinic on Friday. I don't know what they'll do, but it is entirely likely that they will have to, em, "do some manipulation" of the bone. This will involve cutting, pulling, pinning and - possibly - grafting bone from somewhere else (the hip is a favourite).

So, yesterday at the Doctor, he asked if I could take my top off for him to have a look. The Missus was there too. I struggled to get out of the chair, then started struggling with my top. The Doctor, already late with his appointment schedule, asked me "do you mind being a little bit faster? I am very busy". Even the normally calm and patient Missus was going to thump him. I asked him to excuse me for having a smashed clavicle, since I know that he has lots of seriously ill patients to see. Then again, if he had given me the right painkillers in the first place then perhaps I wouldn't have had to come back three days in a row.

He sighed, wrote "morphine" on the prescription pad, and accepted the truth of this.

Why is it that I have to fight so hard to get help from the medical profession when I need it? And, at the same time, have to fight so hard to avoid their "help" when they think I need it and I don't (e.g. - "you better start being nice"). It doesn't make sense.

The Missus never used to believe me, till she started going to appointments with me. She was blessed with a GP who actually cared about the well-being of his patients, in a more holistic sense. If you had a ten-minute appointment, and he thought that you needed half an hour, then everybody else would have to wait. This was her experience, and she thought that al doctors were the same.

The basic problem at work here is one of identification. Let me give you an example.

A good friend of mine is in the fish bizz-ness. Huge processing plant - everything from prawn cocktails to smoked salmon. They employ loads of people who pack the fish on the production line. To the fish-packers, it's a job. It's an hourly rate. Something to pay the bills. They do not identify with their job, they just do it - if that makes sense.

Some doctors identify with their job. They tell themselves "I am a doctor. I heal people". It is their philosophy. They believe in what they do, and they have an excellent bedside manner. Some doctors, on the other hand, have more of fish-packing attitude. They do not identify with their job - they come across as arrogant when, in actual fact, they are just cynical and disinterested.

When I was away at school, I could spot thw two types a mile off. There were teachers who identified with what they did - "I work with troubled kids. I help troubled kids"- and teachers for whom it was just a job - "is that the time? My god, time to get my coat on". Perhaps it is because of this experience that I strongly identify with what I do for a living - I am passionate about it. This is what makes me so good.

Martin, distributor for AJP, identifies with his role as a riding instructor and a distributor of hand-crafted bikes. AJP themselves identify with their role as the menufacturer of hand-crafted bikes. The owners of the Company hand-check each bike on the production line. Try getting identification like that out of Yamaha or Honda. This level of identification, and passion for what they do, was recognised very highly in the Trail Bike Magazine review of the new AJP PR3.

I have a big presentation to do next week - where ourselves and Mr Happy present our competing bids to the outsourcer. The outsourcer will then pick one of them.

The two bids will be very very different. One of them will be based on corporate slickness - all beautifully presented PowerPoint slidesand graphs and charts - but will be devoid of passion. The other one will be less slick, less beautifully presented, but will have passion written all over it.

The choice for the outsourcer is a simple one. Do you want to use people - like Mr Happy - who talk a good game but, ultimately, are just out to shaft you for as much money as they can make? Or do you want to use people - like me - who do this because they are passionate about it, who are obsessed with doing the right thing but who may be a little less posh about the way they speak?

We were having difficulty wading through all of the legal Terms and Conditions that the outsourcer was throwing at us. To be honest, it had caused a bit of a panic. I did the only thing that could be done in this situation - called the outsourcer and asked for help.

You'd be amazed how people are willing to help you if you ask. People like to be asked for advice, they like to appear knowledgeable, and - as a general rule - don't like smart arses. By asking for their help, you are less likely to come across as a smart arse, and are far more likely to have people willing to help you.

Unless, that is, they're doctors who don't identify with being doctors. Then what you get is a whole lot of attitude that rings of "how dare you ask me how I reached such-and-such a conclusion". I make it a rule never to just take tablets prescribed to me without knowing what they are for - what dose they are, what the side-effects are, what family they're in and stuff like that. Some doctors actually like this - it is a welcome break from people just taking the green prescription slips away with them and not saying anything. Some doctors are very affronted by you apparently questioning their judgement. In another context, this would be hubris.

So my daily routine right now consists of:

1. wake up
   
2. write some proposal stuff until it hurts too much
   
3. take some morphine
   
4. be zonked for about an hour
   
5. goto 1

several times a day. Try doing that if you don't identify with what you do - you'd last about 5 minutes.

I don't know what it is yet, but good will come out of this collarbone thing. I have been given this for a reason, and that reason will be revealed to me in the fullness of time. It may well just be that having to sit still for more than 5 minutes at a time will teach me a lesson, or it may be that the whole Morocco experience is a turning point in one way or another. Will keep you posted.

Morpheus

Hypnos was the Greek God of sleep. Nyx was the Greek Goddess of night. They had a son - Morpheus - the God of dreams.


From this Greek word - Morpheus - was derived the term "morphine". Repeated studies have concluded that no substance on earth is more effective superior to morphine for the suppression of pain.

Having been given it at the hospital, I can agree with this. I can also see why it is derived from the Greek God of dreams - it puts you totally out of it. A nurse handed me a syringe (no needle) full of morphine liquid and told me to "get that down you". An hour later, an Osteopath with the bedside manner of Joseph Stalin told me that I didn't need an emergency operation so I can go home now thank you very much. The fracture clinic may wish to operate, but that's their job - not hers.

The jaggy bones - 3 pieces of them - in my shattered clavicle aren't life-threatening, and I haven't punctured any lungs. If the sharp bit of bone sticking up like a stalagmite decides to poke through my skin, then that would obviously be an emergency. Wow, thanks.

When I asked her questions about my shoulder, hat I should be doing and the like, she was very flippant about having to wait for the fracture clinic to get in touch. She prescribed Co-codamol for the pain and then, her extremely valuable 30 seconds having been wasted sufficiently, turned on her heel and departed.

Back in March, I developed this weird infection - I couldn't swallow anything. The swallow reflex just stopped working. We believe now that it was an infection caused by day after day riding in the freezing cold in wet gear.

Anyway, I went four days and couldn't eat. I lost weight - not that I have much to lose. Coincidentally, I had stopped taking medication (an anti-epileptic mood stabiliser) a few weeks before. One of the potential side-effects of this medication is a condition called tardive dyskinesia - spasms in the facial muscles. Perhaps related, perhaps not.

Anyway, I ended up in a doctors surgey in a walk-in centre in Southampton. The busy doctor got his prescription pad out and asked what I wanted. Me, in tears, told him that I wanted somebody to help me. He told me to drink lucozade, since I obviously just needed calories. I told him I couldn't drink either. I explained that I was bipolar, and that change things a little. He told me that "people like you are good at making accusations", and fetched a nurse. He then proceeded to give me the same message, this time in front of the (very very uncomfortable) nurse who was acting as his witness.

Me, I was absolutely dumbstruck. This guy is a doctor, and he's acting like a lawyer. I phoned The Missus, and she came down to the surgery - to act as my witness. This was getting daft now.

Time after time, the prescription pad came out - "what do you want me to prescribe?". Time after time we told him that we didn't know - I cannot swallow. The Missus asked if he had even looked at my throat. The doctor took out his wee scope thingy and a lollipop stick - he'll have a look now. One look, declared that it was some kind of virus that was going around. Now, what is it we'd like prescribed? Out came the pad again.

I called the Mental Health Team from my mobile. I explained that I couldn't eat, and that there was a fair chance my mood would completely crash as a result. They told me to get A&E immediately. Off I went.

I was rushed through A&E - straight into the major trauma unit - and was on a glucose drip within an hour. I was so dehydrated that they were unable to take blood. Not bad for a guy who, less than two hours before, was told to go home and drink Lucozade.

Is it me? Do I attract bad medical karma? Is it, as I sometimes suspect, that when people find out you have one of those illnesses, then you go into a slightly different category?

So I went back to th GP today. The Co-codamol, I tell him, doesn't work. I am in a lot of pain. Excruciating pain. Like somebody is trying to cut their way out of my shoulder - from the inside - with a chainsaw and a couple of sticks of dynamite. It's not just when I move - it can happen if I breathe too deeply. I was sick as a dog last night - the tablets they gave me can cause digestion problems - and the retching nearly killed me.

The doctor stepped up the medication to give me something called Tramadol. This is an opioid, available over the counter in a lot of countries, and is about 10% as potent as morphine. He said he'd give me 2 days worth - see how I get on. What he didn't say - what always remains unspoken - is that they will never prescribe to a bipolar patient a quantity of drugs on which an overdose is possible. Bipolar patients cannot be trusted in this way - imagine the lawsuit.

When I got the prescription from the chemist, the maths didn't add up. I have to take two of these, four times a day. That's 8 tablets per day. I was prescribed 8 tablets in total. The leaflt in the tablets (which I always read) tells me not to take them more frequently than every 12 hours. Something is not right here, so I called the surgery for advice.

There was a woman called Anne who I met in hospital. She had been sectioned. She was bipolar, and had taken an verdose of Lithium. Overdose = instant section. Open-and-shut case you'd think.

Not quite. She had been prescribed 20mg Lithium tablets, to be taken two at a time. The chemist dispensed 200mg - he had read the prescription wrong. She took them for two days - ten times the dose - without realising. When she collapsed and was rushed to hospital, she was sectioned - the burden of proof is always on the mentally ill. "Do you see things that aren't there?" - I rest my case.

Despite the intervention of her GP, who produced a letter from the pharmacist explaining the cock-up - she spent 6 weeks in hospital against her will. Because she refused the medication they wanted to give her (adjunctive medication - it makes you catatonic) they gave it to her forcibly. Sectioned patients have no rights.

So I am back up to the GP tomorrow - the Tramadol does not work either. I don't want morphine, but it's the only thing I've had since coming home from Morocco that seems to work. What I want - what I need - is the fracture clinic to get into gear and pin this bone together.

The bone is in 3 pieces - all of them jaggy - and the bit snapped off in the middle is just floating around. There is about a 1-inch gap between the pieces of bone that are atyached to anything - if there was ever a bone needing a pin, then its this one.

Martin rang earlier to see howI was doing. He liked the video, but said it was a bit mournful - he was waiting on the picture of a headstone at the end of it. The new AJP PR3 got a brilliant review in Trail Bike Magazine - there is a real buzz about how you can get so much 4-stroke power in a bike weighing less than 90kg. Any enduro rider who has ever had to drag their bike out of a ditch will testify to why you want the lightest bike possible.

The AJP PR3 (and the new PR5) will be at the Dirt Bike Show on 6-9 December. Please take a minute to say Hi to Martin, and you can wet yourself at his tales about trying to get a 125cc 2-stroke over 3-feet-high tree trunks at the Midwest Enduro on Sunday.

I may well be there too, but I am under instructions to stay away from the vendor stands if I am wearing the sling. For some reason, bodily injuries are not great adverts for bikes.

Don't Sing With Headphones

The Missus has a lovely voice. All soft and sexy and gentle. Completely useless above background noise, but lovely all the same. She has a lovely singing voice too - sounds like a starling at dawn. Lovely.

So, this evening she was sitting with the headphones on, and singing along to "Fix You" by Coldplay. The thing is, that when you sing, there is a feedback loop going on. Your ears hear your voice, and automatically adjust your pitch to make sure tha you're in tune. When you have headphones on, your feedback loop is broken and you sound an awful lot like a broken piano. Most amusing to listen to.

My ageing friend was over today. Being a helpful chap, he moved Rosie for me onto the driveway. Now there is a golden rule about parking motorcycles - always park where gravity or the engine will get you out again. This simply means that when parking on a hill, park with the back wheel on the downhill side - you can ride out of it - and vice versa.

He rode Rosie nose-first into my downhill driveway. This means I need to go off-road (right over the Missus' lovely lawn) to get her out again. Boy, will I be in trouble. Please don't think for a second that he got away with doing this without a significant amount of piss-taking.

I did my Barbara Cartland impression today. I lay on the floor - all propped up with cushions and stuff - whilst he drew bizz-ness stuff on the whiteboard for the proposal we're writing. All I need now is a pink poodle. The crap dog came and lay beside me, but she's not quite a pink poodle.

The other day, she got "Cato'd" by a cat. If you remember the Pink Panther movies, Cato was Inspector Clouseau's assistant. His job was to hide and to ambush Inspector Clouseau when he was least expecting it. So the cat hid under a car, waiting for the crap dog to walk past. When she did so, the cat leapt out with a shriek resembling "BANZAI!" - right on top of the crap dog. The crap dog, shitting herself, ran a mile - with a hissing cat on her back. Poor thing.

I got the most lovely comment from Big Oz (the whoop-ass headcase with impressive welding skills) posted on the blog. Thanks Oz - made me and The Missus smile.

I also got an email from my ITM - whose daughters tooth has not yet fallen out - asking about my shoulder as well as finding out about when the first enduro of the New Year is (since this is when I'll be riding again). It's probably going to be another Track and Trauma on 13 January, and I will be doing it on a new AJP PR3 - all 89kg of her.

A lot of the guys out in Morocco were of the opinion that you need a really really big bike to do Dakar. This may well be true, but I am looking at the problem in a slightly different way. When the only tool you have is a hammer, every problem looks like a nail. Or, as Albert Einstein put it:

"Any intelligent fool can make things bigger, more complex, and more violent. It takes a touch of genius -- and a lot of courage -- to move in the opposite direction."

If there is anybody in the world who can do it, it's Martin at AJP. If there's anybody in the world who has the balls to attempt riding it to Dakar, it's me. I have so many balls that sometimes I feel like a bingo machine.

Having a busted collarbone is not that bad really. It means I get to walk about with one hand tucked into my shirt - makes me look a lot like Napoleon (short, French dead guy). Napoleon, having been deposed from power, was exiled to Elba by the British in May 1814. He spent the grand total of nine months on the island, before escaping and going back to Paris for the now legendary 100 days (blogs passim). If I get a silly hat, then start a war with pretty much everybody in Europe, then I'll end up following in his footsteps.

I was looking through the holiday insurance policy today to see if I could claim the medical expenses we incurred in Morocco. I came across a brilliant clause in the policy about accidental death, which types of death were covered and which weren't. Apart from the fact that I didn't know that there was degrees of death, I wondered about this.

How would you make a claim? Does the Insurance Company have a call centre in India, and a bunch of mediums in Manchester? Imagine the scene:

Medium: "Is there anybody there? Anybody on the other side?"
Me (dead): "Whooo!"
Medium: "What is your policy number?"

Doesn't quite work.

So I made a mistake, but I lived to tell the tale. Mr Einstein, who has a take on just about everything, put it better than I ever could:

"Anyone who has never made a mistake has never tried anything new."

Like a broken collar bone will stop me. This is a setback, but a temporary one. My ageing friend thinks I am completely sectionable but, in a funny kind of way, kind of admires me for it.

Why Do We Fall?

Apart from inadequate bike skills, there's a very good reason why we fall. If we didn't fall, then we'd never learn to pick ourselves up.

Samuel Butler, a 19th century novelist, famously said:

"Don't learn to do, but learn in doing. Let your falls not be on a prepared ground, but let them be bona fide falls in the rough and tumble of the world"

In other words, how can you learn anything if all of your mistakes are made in a sterile environment where pain is not possible?

Pretty much all my life, I have been picking myself up off the floor. Being bi-polar is all about being on the floor and being able to pick yourself up from it. Sometimes, it is really difficult to do. Sometimes, on the really hard days, it is tedious - what is the point of picking yourself up from the floor if you know you're going to be back there again within a week?

I had a bad fall in the desert. My worst fall to date. It happened in the real world - this was no simple pretend fall with a safety net. It was a real fall, on to real rocks, at a real 40 mph in the real desert. I have learned from it - the most important lesson being that falling is bad. The second most important lesson is that sometimes letting go of the throttle is the wrong thing to do.

I am licking wounds, getting over the fact that I won't be riding for a couple of months. Muhammed Ali put it better than I ever could when he said:

"I never thought of losing, but now that it's happened, the only thing is to do it right. That's my obligation to all the people who believe in me. We all have to take defeats in life"

Ali was blessed with an unshakeable belief in himself. He was the self-proclaimed greatest long before he ever won a boxing title. I saw an interview with Ali after h was diagnosed with Parkinson's, where the interviewer was saying it was such a shame to see him in this state,

Ali stood up to his full height towered over the ibterviewer, and shouted:

"You DO NOT EVER feel sorry for me. I am Muhammad Ali - I am the greatest - DO NOT EVER feel sorry for me".

I aspire to the same level of self-belief. This is the same guy who once said:

"I'm so fast that last night I turned off the light switch in my hotel room and was in bed before the room was dark".

I am so tough, and so determined, that the river bed in Morocco is shitting itself for the day I go back there and nail it. I did not come this far to fail.

I was explaining to the Wee Yin today that there are 206 bones in the human body. I only broken one. That means that I have have 205 bones that are unbroken and OK - 99.5% of my bones are intact. Not a bad batting average.

It's all about perspective. I will be back.

Home Again

Take a stressed Missus, my dislike of flying, a 4am start, broken collarbone, a 5-hour wait in Casablanca, chuck them in a pre-heated aircraft for a few hours and you have the makings of a lovely ding-dong cake. Inbetween being at eachothers throats, we had to travel several thousand miles, and keep smiling at the people travelling with us. Much tearfulness and upsetness by the time we got home - it had to go pop at some point I suppose.

If I described the journey home as "pleasant", I could not keep a straight face. It was hell. As soon as I sat in the chair, I knew that there would be a problem - sharp pains in the left shoulder told me this.

One upside was hacking into the wireless network of the First Class Lounge - this gave me free Internet access at the airport. Took all of 15 seconds to do it. Security systems - especially in IT - are designed by human beings. You just need to think one step ahead of them, and you're in. My thanks to Royal Air Maroc for the free Internet access during our stay there - you really need to raise the security bar a bit higher guys.

There was a mix-up with the seats - double booking and people with boarding passes having them in the same seat. An announcement came over the tannoy:

"The aircraft will start moving in 1 minute. Please sit somewhere - anywhere - otherwise we will sit here on the tarmac for 1 hour"

Everybody sat down. Welcome to Air Morocco.

My ITM showed the brilliance of his character time and time again. Every time we had to move, he picked up my bag. I didn't ask him - he just did it. Thank You. You have no idea the pain I was in.

We kissed goodbye at Heathrow - he had to catch a flight to Dublin - but there was no tongues involved. There would have been no point - he had used up all of his vaseline in a vaseline missile fight with Billy back at the Hotel. It started by Billy lobbing a banana across the balcony, and escalated into handfuls of vaseline being lobbed at eachother, passing over the heads of the couple on the balcony inbetween as part of their greasy ballistic arc. They even paid the cleaner a few extra groats as an apology - there was vaseline everywhere. At least we know what it was for now.

Our taxi driver, an old guy by the name of Larry, took it easy on the way home - even in the Heathrow rush hour traffic. As it turned out, he was flying to Morocco the following day for a Agatha Christie-style train journey from Casablanca through the Atlas Mountains.

Casablanca. Conjures up images of Humphrey Bogart. "Out of all the riverbeds, in all the world, you had to crash into mine". Contrary to popular belief, he didn't actually say "Play it again Sam" - he simply said "Play it Sam". Same as Captain Kirk never once said "Beam me up Scotty" - it was always "Beam me up Mr Scott".

By the way, the Morocco video. Please email me if you'd like DVD quality of it, and I'll tell you where you can download it.

Back with a bump and a half. There are proposals needing written, Wee Yin needing lots of cuddles, and a crap dog needing to be much less crap than she actually is. The Wee Yin was so pleased to see us, and the Arab princess veil thing is such a huge hit.

Muckspreader came over last night, and we kind of caught up on everything that had happened. She has been an absolute star this week - we could not have managed without her help. Thank You Muckspreader (even though she will kill me for continuing to call her this).

So I am unemployed. Hundreds of messages on my phone about work - Monday will reveal whether or not there is any traction in any of them.

My ITM's daughter's tooth is just about to fall out - she's the same age as the Wee Yin - and my ITM bought her a lovely little box to put it in. I hope that he made it home before the tooth fell out. It made me wonder about the Moroccan Tooth Fairy - does it wake the kids up during the night, and haggle over the price of the tooth?

I can't really type a lot since I am typing with one hand only. Even thought this is still in excess of 100wpm, it's frustrating sice I can't get my thoughts out as quickly as they come.

One thing though - a big big Thank You to all of the guys on the Morocco trip. You made us welcome, even after I was injured, and helped us salvage the week. Especially Zippy - thank you so much for the bike ride, and the ability to record the ZippyCam.

What you get, when you don't get what you expect, is experience. And what an experience. Book a trip with Team Desert Rose - you will not regret it.

I will get back to reality tomorrow. Decisions are still banned for now.