So, I did start a travel blog. Hooray for me. And now I’m not doing any travelling again for a few months. Great timing. OK, well, I’m going to Poland tomorrow actually, but apart from that, nothing planned. It’s a bit strange. I've spent most of the past 18 months either ‘being’ somewhere or ‘preparing’ to be somewhere (which involves thinking about packing and pretending to do work preparation, and then leaving it all til the last minute, and getting in a big panic). So, instead I'm going to consider some personal ‘records’ I have broken this year. Plus that means I get to do some counting with real live numbers.
They're alive!
I would like you to think of this post as that quintessential childhood present - yet another edition of the Guinness Book of Records. An elderly relative got you it. You don’t want it. It’s hardback and impossible to read without an industrial crane and some winching equipment to hold it up. Don’t try and read it in bed whatever you do, more than 9000 children a year are injured in hardback book related injuries. The big problem though with the GBOR is that you just don’t care how many eggs someone blind-folded can balance on their chin while doing a hand-stand, while fencing with a tiger, while completing a Rubik’s Cube with their feet. And mainly, mainly, hardly any of the records ever change each year. Must be a terrifying job editing GBOR. You can imagine the publisher saying ‘OK, let’s have a new angle this year! What have you got for me?’ and the poor editor saying ‘Well... err... actually nothing has really changed since last year. Maybe we’ll just publish the same book again, with some new pictures. We can put Usain Bolt on the cover though!’ Which incidentally, works every day for The Daily Mail, only with rotating images of ‘foreign things that are bad’ instead of Usain Bolt. Although, he was on the cover of The Daily Mail after the last Olympics in fairness.
Anyway, this blog is the whimsical internet version of the hard-back GBOR 2011 (and don’t even get me started on that, how can the 2011 edition be out all ready? It was published on September 16th 2010! Unless one of the Records broken this year is the shattering of time-space laws to allow time travel that is SIMPLY NOT POSSIBLE!)
Enough waffling for now; here are some personal records what I have done broken this year:
- Travelled more than 9000 miles by train. This is a long way. Further than I have ever travelled by train before. It’s actually enough to get you to the moon and back if trains could somehow go vertically instead of horizontally. Amazing isn’t it? It’s also utter rubbish (the moon part), the moon is a LONG way away! Don’t think that just because Tom Hanks almost made it there that it’s close.
- Flown circa 63,500 miles. That’s 2.5 times around the Earth. Did you know if you got a really fast plane (and I mean REALLY fast, like 1000 MPH) and you could refuel it in mid-air you could run away from the sun by flying round the Earth, living in eternal daylight? Or you could move to the top of Scandinavia for a bit during summer cos, you know, that’s a lot cheaper.
- My carbon footprint is a shocking 105 tonnes of CO2 per annum. I need to plant more than 5000 trees to offset it. 100 tonnes of weight is around 25 Indian elephants. Imagine 25 elephants, all made from carbon. Dark as the night and charging at you, their jet-black tusks extinguishing all light and hope. Pretty terrifying, huh?
- Slept around 220 nights in hotels meaning I could potentially have stolen: 220 bars of soap, 44 litres of shampoo and more than 100 metres of cotton from sewing kits. It also means I’ve spent around 7 hours of this year just checking in and out of hotels. Check in. Check out. Check in. Check out. It’s like a very shit corporate version of The Karate Kid, where Mr Miyagi is played by Alan Sugar. Think about it. But not for too long.
- It would take me more than 5 years to walk the distance I have travelled in 2010 (at 4 mph, 10 hours a day, every single day). I’m too lazy for that, but no doubt Ranulph Fiennes could do it!
- I have trained more than 200 people face to face. Almost all of them cool. Aren’t people great? Yes they are.
- I’ve drunk just over 1,000 pints of beer. The best? Hmmm... Zywiec maybe? The worst? Can’t remember. What does that tell you about the state of my memory, and my liver, and my memory!
- Sent more than 5,000 emails. How ridiculous is that? Admittedly, most of them contained pictures of a whimsical nature, or facts about cats BUT STILL!
Interesting facts huh? I think so. Ish. With that in mind I can craft some New Year Resolutions for 2011.
I will:
- Try and fly less, but I don’t think that’ll work, so instead I will start saving to buy some farm land in the future that I can then turn into a forest. Maybe in later life I will live there amongst the trees, like a 21st century Peter Pan. Or an Ewok!
- Try and drink less. Scoff. Quintessential resolution engaged! We’ll see how that works out.
- Not even consider walking instead of flying or getting the train. That would be stupid.
- Steal everything from hotels I can get my hands on.
- Apply the Pareto principle to my email sending (but funny emails are unaffected by this change).
Done.
