When I was a lazy student getting up at 12pm and attending the odd lecture or two, I looked at people working 9-5 and thought what a nightmare it would be. In fact I dreaded having to do that. I imagined a life of living for the weekends. Having to get up on weekday mornings, going in on a Monday counting the hours until Friday night and freedom to do what I wanted to do. I thought that I’d not be able to do anything on a week night as I had to be in the office the next day. My daylight hours would be spent chained to a desk dreaming of my student days.

In short, I didn’t want that life. I loved the free time afforded to me from being a student. It let me do the things I enjoyed like mountain biking, running, sleeping and avoiding daytime television. But here I am years later working 9-5, Monday to Friday. Is life the way I imagined it to be? Am I distinctly unhappy, constantly looking forward to the weekend? The answer is “partly”.

Whenever people discuss taking a year out to go travelling, the best advice is generally to do it between University and “real life”, otherwise you’ll never get around to it. And this seems to hold true for most people I know (myself included so far). The argument always went that you’d get sucked into working life and feel it’s too large a risk to quit your job, travel and then try to get another job again afterwards. People get too comfortable and I can well understand that. Of course, there are many exceptions to the rule, but majority rules (I realise that I’m not too hot on wordplay, but there you go).

I always assumed that I’d get on the career ladder and try to get myself up to more senior roles, more responsibility, more pressure, longer hours and more money. But that’s not the way it’s turned out at all. And given the choice between my current life and the life of a student, I’d take this one every time. It’s got a great deal to do with actually enjoying my work and earning many times more money than I did between ages 18-24. And it’s got a lot to do with the fact that I want different things out of life.

For one thing I’m not career minded. All throughout my younger days it seemed that a “career” was all that mattered after education. But now, as a software engineer, I think to myself “what’s the point?”. I’m not interested in things like promotions and long term goals and objectives. I’m more interested in what I’m doing just now and next after the thing I’m doing now. I enjoy problem solving and I spend every day solving various problems, some that take a few hours, others that take a few days. I get to be creative and use my brain. I get to work alongside people I like and respect. I also get paid for the privilege. What more could I want?

So I work from around 9am to 5pm Monday to Friday. Big deal. If I hated what I was doing I’d be watching the clock all the time and be annoyed that it’s dark in the evening and my working life consumes most of the daylight hours. But I’m not. Sure, I look forward to weekends but by playing football at lunchtime a couple of times a week I manage to break up the 5 days somewhat so it just flies by. I spend weekday evenings either doing sporty things or watching TV (and occasionally writing website articles), so it’s not as if I’m so knackered that I have no life outside of work.

I guess that when I escaped University I found the world I was entering into to be completely different to the one I imagined. I got lucky and got a good job and moved to a lovely part of the world. But I believe that you make your own luck. So I’ve either lowered my expectations on life and am making the best of a bad situation, or I’ve got a better perspective on life and am making the best of a good situation. I think I prefer the latter, and it feels more real to me. I guess the moral of the story is that students don’t know a damn thing about real life until they actually enter it for real.

Being British (that’s Scottish first, then British) I’ve always had an obsession with the weather driven into me from an early age. I’ve tried to fight against it and be neutral towards weather with varying degrees of success. In fact, the only weather I really notice is weather that is out of the ordinary. The rest is pretty much the same, cloudy with frequent rain showers. So with that in mind I thought I’d catalogue some of the more memorable weather experiences I’ve had over the years, mostly while hiking in my home country of Scotland.

Wind that makes rivers flow uphill.

I experienced this while climbing Ben Nevis (that’s Scotland’s highest mountain) a few years ago with a good friend of mine. We opted to not follow the “tourist path” up the mountain because it’s so commonly used and it’s tedious (I believe you spend several hours looking at false summit after false summit thinking you’re nearly there, which you’re not, until you just don’t care any more). So we skirted around to Allt a’Mhuilinn, the glen on the north side of Nevis and proceeded to walk straight up the side of Carn Mor Dearg (next to Nevis) and around the ridge and up to the summit (look on a map if you want to know what the hell I’m talking about). Hard work though it was it was made far, far harder by the ridiculous wind that was blowing all day. On the way up to the foot of the mountain proper all the little streams running down the sides of the hill were actually being blown straight up in the air like fountains. Quite a sight (should have taken a picture). The hike up the top part was tough because every few steps we would literally be blown onto our knees, powerless to stop it when it happened. I’d never felt so small and insignificant before.

Cold to freeze your soul.

Quite a few winters ago Scotland got hit by an unusually cold spell. The down side was that many thousands of home were without electricity or water for a time, but the up side was the clear skies that made excellent hiking conditions. So I went with my then girlfriend, her brother and his wife (you following this?) on a day’s hiking. It was seriously cold and about -35 degrees C (which is damn cold by UK standards). I was wrapped up in 21st century technology (gore-tex jacket and ex-Russian army furry hat) so I didn’t really notice it until I took my glove off to throw a snowball at my girlfriend (I missed, for what it’s worth). Almost immediately my hand decided to put me through all kinds of pain as it rapidly started to freeze (I’m no wuss, every time I go biking in the cold my feet freeze numb almost straight away and I never complain about that). I had to work quite hard to get my hand to work again. Anyway, as I said, it was seriously cold. Lesson: keep your gloves on when you throw a snowball.

Life above the clouds.

I’ve always been fascinated by temperature inversion where you find yourself above the clouds looking down on a sea of white fluff. My most memorable encounter with this phenomenon was above Glen Shiel where a friend and I camped at over 3000 feet and woke up to perfect blue skies above us and rivers of cloud below. You don’t have to be very high above sea level to experience weather inversion but it makes you feel like you’re on top of the world (at least it does with me).

Sunshine on a rainy day.

You can’t beat slogging through clouds and rain to have it all magically disappear and the sun shine through. It does occasionally happen and it’s great when it does, especially when you’re on the top of a mountain (even better if you’re in Scotland). Anyway, Glencoe seems to get more than its fair share of rain and it’s rare that it’s sunny when I’m there, but as you can see (right) it did one day.

So that’s a few of my favourite weather memories that I have accompanying photos for. More when I encounter them. I do have recurring dreams about tornadoes so maybe some day I’ll see one of them and it’ll make it onto the list…

Now pay attention. Wait until after nightfall. Then go get your mountain bike and put it in the back of your (or your friend’s) car. Go over to your helmet with a roll of duck tape and stick the head torch you just bought to the front of it. Dig out a pair of warm leggings from your “never wear” drawer (preferably Ron Hill’s brand – they’re really uncool, but high quality) and put them on over your fetching cycling shorts. Get a long-sleeved top and put that on (and you need to bin that fluorescent yellow t-shirt you were going to wear – it’s horrible and very 1990). Walk over to your favourite waterproof jacket and put it on (it’s Gore-Tex? even better). Grab a beanie hat (I like to call them mugger’s hats, by the way) and put that on. Okay, you’re all set, get into the car. Oh, and on your way out leave your sanity at the door. You won’t be needing it.

Last night I followed the above advice to the letter and went night biking for the first time. And it was a hell of a good laugh. Whereas during daylight hours I can race down a rocky hill and pick a nice line well before I get there (thus avoiding the biggest rocks) you don’t have that luxury at night. You have at most a light patch a few metres wide a few metres ahead of you and with that section of gloomy ground you have to decide how fast you want to go, which way to lean and steer and where you need to break. Of course, I quickly learned that the best policy is to not really bother about that sort of thing and instead just forget about the ground and go for it. In fact I probably went downhill faster than I do during the daytime (less things to worry about you see).

My friend and I decided to do an 8 mile route that wasn’t too remote, just as a way to get into the whole night biking thing and we’ll definitely be doing it again. Once I got used to the fact that I really couldn’t see very much ahead of me I loved the adrenaline-pumping action of not knowing if I was going to be flung over a wall or through a knee deep puddle. As it happens the terrain was pretty straightforward so neither option really materialised, although I did have a couple of “oh dear, I seem to be leaning the wrong way” and “I want to go this way but my bike wants to go that way” moments.

In case you want to try this evening pastime then here are a few things to watch out for:

1. Gates. They spring out of nowhere and you really don’t want to hit one at 20mph.
2. Cows. They’re pretty big and for some strange reason they’re quite hard to spot with a torch when you’re moving at high speed.
3. Flat light. The trouble with lights, even powerful spotlights, is that they produce flat light that makes it quite tricky to spot ruts and determine the shape of the path ahead. Be careful.
4. Cold nights. If it’s close to winter (like now) then your suspension and running gear might actually freeze so watch out if your brakes stop working, gears stop shifting and bounciness stops bouncing.

But the bottom line is that it’s great fun and well worth a shot. Much better than sitting around watching TV on a dark night thinking about how much fun mountain biking is and how great it’ll be when summer returns. Plus it’s great exercise.

Update: The story continues in Night Biking Extreme!

It’s been a good couple of months (maybe three) since I was last out on my mountain bike. When the nights get too short and it rains / snows / blows a sub-zero gale all day I get my bike, store it away, and pretty much forget about it. But sooner or later the voice in my head starts to tell me that the weather is good enough and I should get back on the saddle. But I ignore that voice and instead listen to the one that says “nah, put the TV on, there’s a great football match on”.

Luckily, I have friends who go through the same thing. And together we eventually manage to persuade each other to get our bikes out from hibernation, clean them (the last time I used it I didn’t clean it, I just put it away – it’s traditional) and hit the trail. And so it was on Sunday that a friend and I actually managed to return to our stamping ground of the lovely Yorkshire Dales. And a nice day it was too. It was sunny, reasonably warm (so I could wear my fetching shorts) and the ground wasn’t too much of a quagmire as the moors of Yorkshire can tend to be. And once a couple of us have gone biking, the inevitable enthusiasm we come back with will kick everyone else out of their winter slumber.

Thing is though, I always go through the same routine at this time of year. It consists of stages, starting with “does everything still work?” shortly followed by “was there anything I intended to do with my bike before I rode it again like buy new brakes / bearings / wheels, etc?”, then “oh, I must put the saddle up – oh dear, it seems to be welded in place, I’ll just spend the next 30 minutes trying to wrench the damn thing out before swearing to buy a new seat pin (which I’ll never get around to)”. Then I have to remember how my bike computer works. I always throw the manual away with these things and then can’t remember which of the buttons does what, press one that inevitably resets the memory and then I have to work out my wheel circumference and how to input that.

As soon as I actually get on the bike again (after lubricating the chain) I normally get a collection of clicking noises from somewhere in the drivetrain as I pedal and the gears flick around randomly. Strangely though, after a few miles and a few gallons of mud, everything seems to sort itself out and the bike is plush and sweet again. Although the same can’t be said for me. After a couple of hours of biking (including doing one climb that I failed to manage in one go last time when I was fit but did this time) I feel like I’ve gone ten rounds with a whip-crazy dominatrix (I can already hear the hits from Google coming in). I do a lot of squatting with heavy weights that exercises loads of muscles on my legs and buttocks but that serves as no preparation for the pain that comes with biking after a long absence.

And, as usual, the pain and stiffness will last exactly three days and then I’ll feel fine. But the thing with adrenaline sports like mountain biking is that it leaves me with a good pain. I earned it. And as the days get longer I look forward to more episodes of me groaning like I will when I’m in my 60s every time I stand up from my chair. Actually, whenever I need to make a decision like “should I do this or that?” I try to look back from when I’m old or dead (or both) and see which decision I’d be most happy with, retrospectively. Always gives me a good perspective on my current life. And looking back from the future, I think I need to stop writing right now. No, now.

Well, after over a year with jbconners.com, I’ve finally decided to change the whole site to the cleverly title johnsadventures.com. Everything else stays the same, it’s just a change of name, and I think it makes a bit more sense. For the time being I’ll be forwarding links from the old site to the new one, but I’ll eventually kill it off so just update your bookmarks now and avoid confusion! And maybe having the new name will inspire me to have even more exciting adventures. We’ll see.

When I look back over my 28 years of life I’d have to say that my time at school wasn’t the most influential to making me the man I am today. In fact, even University didn’t turn me into this fine specimen you see before you. It was when I left home and had to fend for myself with no safety net that forced me to grow up and decide who I wanted and had to be. But when I was at school it seemed like the centre of my world and if I fucked up there my life would be over. So it set me thinking, what did I learn in secondary school (aged 12-17) that I still have with me today?

Actually, I’ll tell you what really set me thinking. One of the guys at work was doing something that involved getting the dot product of two vectors. Now, ask a 15 year old school kid about this trivial mathematical exercise and they’ll have it done in a few seconds flat. It’s basic maths. But I’ll be damned if I could remember anything about it. I remember words like “eigen-vectors”, “polynomial equations”, “calculus” and “projective transforms”, but I can’t remember anything more than the words. I’m a software engineer, mathematics comes into my life all the time. But if I need to do something I can’t remember from my school days, I just look it up on Google. I sat back and realised that I could remember virtually no maths that I learned in school, and maths was my top subject.

In fact, about the only information I still retain from school is my knowledge of Scottish history imparted by my scary ex-history teacher (I talked all about that before so I’ll spare you a repeat performance). I guess the lessons went in one ear and over the years have fallen out of the other.

Next is social interaction. When you’re a kid prior to attending school, you’ve spent all of your time with your parents (or their child minders if they’re rich, or the prison officers if you were a problem child), so you’re used to being the centre of attention (one way or the other). But come school you’re just one of many and have to adjust to being surrounded by people who love football, people who hate football, bullies, girls, intellectuals, different cultures and so on. So you need to learn to adapt and fit in. But at my school at least people seemed to join cliques and pretty much hang around with the same people for years. So you join a group and between you adopt an attitude and behaviour patterns. All well and good.

But when I left school I left that all behind me. I am still in touch with a few people I went to school with, but it’s a very small handful. And you won’t catch me looking the rest up on friends reunited either. I actually learned all about social interaction at University where there was a real diversity of people, rather than just a perceived one.

I then considered that maybe I’d learned how to work and study while I was at school. After all, you spend all those years at school to sit a whole load of exams to determine your next step in life. But I didn’t need to study or work hard at school. I was one of those lucky people who could drift through and get good grades without burning the midnight oil. Actually, I wrote my Higher English RPR (Response to Personal Reading I believe the acronym was) essay on two books, one of which I never even read (I got an ‘A’ amazingly). In fact I carried that technique through University and didn’t do too badly!

And then there was school sports. I was a skinny lad at school. I wasn’t fit, didn’t like team sports, didn’t like individual sports (except squash, but I was a sore loser and had more temper tantrums than Elton John in a shoe shop) and couldn’t swim. Nowadays I can catch a football on the back of my neck, fire down the aces on a tennis court (without losing the rag if it goes out), perform four sets of twenty-rep squats of well over my own weight, row 3000m in around 11 minutes, swim 400m in under 5 minutes, run for literally as long as I like and oh, I still don’t play rugby or cricket. The bottom line is that I didn’t become physically active until I hit about 21 (late developer you see, I still can’t even grow a full beard).

So come on John. You’ve started this rant about school and so far all you have to show for it is that you learned your social skills at a later age, you’ve forgotten almost all the knowledge that was painstakingly imparted by your teachers, you were lazy and didn’t work hard at school so you must have picked that up elsewhere (if at all) and you didn’t become a self-confessed sport-a-holic until your twenties. It’s about time you put in some positives and demonstrated that you do have something to show for all those years.

Trouble is, I’m not sure I can. Virtually nothing of the 12-17 year old petulant youth in me is left. My childhood neuroses and insecurities are gone. My personality is completely different. And virtually nothing I was taught is of use to me today. But the point, I think, is this (I’ve got it, ha!). My school years were part of a process. The process of turning me from a child into an adult. The structure of school during that age was exactly what a hormone driven kid like me needed. The things I learned are the things I didn’t realise I learned at all. Enter the analogy…

If you look at a butterfly, what does it have in common with a caterpillar? Butterflies eat nectar and caterpillars eat leaves. Butterflies can fly and caterpillars can, eh, crawl on leaves. They don’t look anything like each other and if you saw them both for the first time you’d never believe they were of the same species. But without the caterpillar and it’s leaf eating you’d never have the butterfly. That’s not to say that I think I’ve become some kind of butterfly (if anything I’d be more of a moth, or at least moth-eaten). But it’s my analogy and I’m sticking with it. And it neatly rounds off this piece.