I think I need to amplify something I alluded to earlier, which is the motivational effect of a good tail wind on a cyclist.
Many people think that a cyclist's wost enemy is heavy rain and large trucks thundering past. Although these definately feature high on the scale, public enemy number one for a cyclist is a constant head-wind.

I've been lucky enough to only have encountered a head-wind on a couple of days and that was only for part of the day, but I did meet one cyclist who'd faced a head-wind for three days in a row, and was seriously thinking of giving up his trip.

It doesn't sound like it's such a bad thing, but I reckon I can do about 15 - 18 mph on the flat with no wind. Give me a reasonable tail-wind and this ramps up to something like 25 - 28 mph (you can actually feel yourself getting pushed up the hills - a very nice feeling). However, with a reasonable head-wind (i.e. nothing like hurricane strength), and I'm down to about 8 mph on the flat, and considerably lower going up any hill.

It's amazing just how much wind resistance one scrawny body and a bicycle represent, and very dispiriting when the whole day is spent cycling against such a wind, which is often gusting unpredictably.

So, maybe you can understand that the joy I experienced yesterday cycling through the Orkneys was somewhat aided by having the best tail-wind of the trip, helping my along all day (even letting me accomplish a few hills in top gear or near top gear).

Something I learnt yesterday: a person from the Orkney Islands is called an Orcadian, which somehow seems a grander title than you'd think they merited (no offence to the Oracadians out there).

I've just arrived back in Edinburgh by train, after completing the cycling yesterday with a fantastic sunny day zooming through the Orkneys (had a magnificent tail wind), checking out the standing stones and other neolithic sites. I've had a better trip than I expected across the top of Scotland, both with the weather, but also with the scenery. It seems like a bit of a secret, but there's some fantastic golden sand beaches up there, surrounded by pretty cool countryside (I guess the unpredictability of weather is the thing that keeps more people from knowing about this).

John O' Groats (or Jan de Groot, to give him his proper name) was nothing special, a couple of tourist shops and a signpost, but I was expecting that. However, I wasn't sure what to expect when I caught the ferry across to Burwick at the bottom of the Orkneys, but I was pleasantly surprised. As well as having some very nice rolling countryside and reasonably quiet roads to cycle on (although there are more people living there than I realised), there's some fascinating history.

The islands are linked by a series of causeways, so you travel from one to another by road. I thought this was rather considerate of the Orkney authorities, but it turns out that the purpose of these causeways is to block off the eastern sea approaches. During the second World War a large chunk of the British fleet operated out of the Orkneys, and although they thought that the eastern approaches were unnavigable because of sunken ships, a U-boat manged to sneak through in October 1939 and sink the Royal Oak, with a loss of 800 lives.
As a result, the causeways were built, largely with the aid of Italian prisoners of war, who left behind the Italian chapel, an amazing piece of work created by the POWs using two Nissan huts.

As well as the war history (I think also that much of the German fleet from World War I was scuttled in the Orkney waters before the British could prevent it), there's an impressive amount of neolithic history, more than I've seen anywhere else in the UK. Within the space of a few miles there are at least two circles of standing stones, one "conventional" sized circle with huge stones (the Stones of Stenness), and one huge-sized circle with conventional sized stones (the Ring of Brogar), a neolithic mausoleum, and the fascinating Skara Brae.

Skara Brae is a village that was constructed just over 5000 years ago (it gives me a headache thinking how long ago that is - it's longer ago than the building of the pyramids, and is longer before the birth of christ than we've been around since, by oh, a thousand years). And, for 5000-year old architecture, there's some relatively modern innovations, albeit a few things we take for granted are missing (such as windows - therefore no fire = no light).
Each house has a large dresser at the head of the room, and for those of us who have grown weary of repeated trips to Ikea, there's plenty of inbuilt storage in the walls and behind the furniture. And, right up to date with current thinking, the dwellings are very thermally efficient, being sunk into the sand dunes with turf covering the stone walls.
All very fascinating, and well worth a look if you ever make it that far north.

Ok, so that's the cycling bit over - I've just traded my bike in for a backpack and will be heading south to Newcastle tomorrow for a bit of a look around and then to spend 2-3 days walking the central section of Hadrian's Wall.

One of the themes that I've noticed arising during my cycle trip is the old and the new appearing in the landscape that I've been passing through.

On my first day, cycling from Penrith to Alston, I stopped off to look at the Long Meg stone circle, thousands of years old, and while I was there an RAF Tornado jet fighter zoomed overhead on low-level manoeuveres.
This wasn't the only time that I encountered the RAF jets - one day, cycling through the tops of the Penines I felt like I was being buzzed by two Tornados for much of the afternoon - they seemed to be following me for most of the afternoon, swooping overhead. They practice their low-level flying over the English-Scottish border, supposedly flying as low as 250 feet, but I'm sure they were lower than that, and it can be disconcerting to be wandering along a village high street or a country lane when one flies past - because of the speed that they travel at, there's often no audible warning until they are directly overhead.
I did even come across a memorial between Callendar and Killin to two RAF aircrew who'd died when their Tornado crashed into the hillside - suffice to say this makes me even a bit more worried when one passes low overhead.

On another note, I've been seeing plenty of house-martins and swifts, but only maybe one or two swallows.
According to the BBC, the swallows have been held up somewhere on their migration back from Africa to the UK, so have not yet turned up (and of course summer doesn't start until the swallows arrive en-masse, or so the saying goes).
I wasn't even sure until recently how to tell swifts, swallows and house-martins apart, but I've discovered that the swallow has the much longer tail feathers, whereas house-martins have a white-patch on their backs, and swifts are brownish and higher-flying.

I've spent a few evenings now during my cycle trip watching the house-martins and swifts circle round whichever village I've ended up in, swooping between the buildings and over the meadows chasing insects.
A very pleasant occupation indeed, after a good pub meal and a couple of beers, given that it's pretty much fully light until 10:30pm.

I've arrived at Aviemore, the Scottish ski resort, and it's a bizarre town. Although I've seen ski resorts in a number of other countries, I never expected to find the equivalent in the UK, and it just seems so unnatural.

There's the large hotels, the faux pine-cladding on the shops, the general newness of everything, and true to form regarding ski-resorts, the lack of anything that could be called a halfway decent pub.
Apparently the facilities on the ski-field are actually not that bad, but the problem is the lack of good (i.e. clear) weather during the season.
The only concession that I could find to a typical UK high street was the Sue Ryder shop (a UK chain of charity shops).

Well, Inverness tomorrow, then off into the vast wilderness that is northern Scotland.

Have just made it to Pitlochry, which is a buzzing little town in the Scottish Highlands. Quite a nice place, but everyone seems rather busy, and for some reason it gives me the impression of a TV/film-set town, where everybody's just been given the signal to perform while the camera pans through town (or maybe it's just me, not having seen too much in the way of population centres for the last three days).

Yesterday's cycling was fantastic, the best day's cycling yet, tracking an old railway from Callendar to Killin in glorious weather, passing alongside long lochs, underneath fantastic stone bridges and over long viaducts, while not really encountering anything capable of generating a sweat (even managed to spend half the morning, enjoying morning tea in the sunshine).
A good part of my cycle journey through the top of England, and Scotland has been along old railway lines, where the track and sleepers have been ripped up and the route turned into cycling and walking paths. These are absolutely great, as you get to see some amazing countryside along well-formed tracks while not having to navigate any significant gradients. Because trains can only handle very gentle slopes, the people that originally built these railway lines have had to be ingenious in their routing through the mountains of Scotland (the only part of the UK I've seen where I feel the word "mountain" is truely justified).
The bridges and viaducts that I've encountered on these railway routes often make me stop to appreciate the skill and effort that was spent on their construction - they were all fully manual creations, created by hand in the 18th and 19th centuries, and would have taken a great deal of manpower to put together. And although these railway lines are now redudant, they would have been in use for typically well over a hundred years, so I guess they would have got their money's worth out of them.

It's a pity that these routes don't carry trains any more - a number of them would be fantastic scenic journeys, and would surpass most journey's available these days on the British railway network.

Edinburgh is such a cool city.

I've been roaming around today, just taking in the city and enjoying the good weather, and the whole place is just buzzing.
Had a wander round the castle, which I've not done on my previous two times here, and managed to sneak into a tour group and get a bit of the commentary. Saw the Scottish "Honours" (i.e. the crown jewels), which included the stone of scone, the lump of sandstone that's been used as a coronation seat for over 1000 years. Slightly ordinary in appearance, it's been graced by a large number of royal bums, including that of the current incumbent, QE II (I think in her case the stone was actually shoved underneath the coronation throne proper, rather than her sitting directly on it).
Such a more down-on-the-farm piece of furniture I couldn't imagine.

About six years ago Kate and I came reasonably close to moving to Edinburgh; while she was still at UCL, Kate was offered a research post here (with part of the same organisation that ended up producing Dolly the sheep, I think), but unfortunately the job didn't come with funding, and she couldn't arrange the requisite funding through the British Research Council.
Would have been very interesting living here, I'm sure - after spending 6 years or so at university in Dunedin, Edinburgh feels remarkably similar, with a culture that seems all out of proportion to the size of the place.

One thing I certainly didn't expect is walking into the the Elephant House (one of the best cafes in this town, discovered on a previous visit), and being confronted with "Tears" by the Crocodiles (great NZ band from the early 1980s) issuing from the sound system. Made my day, very nicely.
Along with Stockholm, I think it has to be one of the few places in Europe I'd consider living for an extended period of time.

Tomorrow it's back on the bike for the start of an eight-day stint that'll see me end up in Inverness, where I plan to take another rest day.

In preparation for heading off to Spain next month, I've started reading a book about the Spanish civil war by Antony Beevor. I've known vague details about the conflict for years, particularly via the writings of authors such as Hemingway, but I never realised the true horror of the conflict.
It's no wonder the Spanish are still reluctant to talk about it, and don't seem to have fully owned up to their history - it was a time of brutal slaughter and repression (on both sides, but particularly the fascist Nationalists under Franco), and led to many deaths (there's a report of a mass grave discovered in recent years on the outskirts of Saragossa containing 7000 bodies, killed by the Nationalists) - grim stuff indeed. Franco stated that he was prepared to "shoot half of Spain", and managed to work some way towards this.

There were a number of causitive factors, but it seems that it was basically a fight against "old" Spain (i.e. the large landowners, the Catholic church, and the military) and "new Spain (the liberals and the workers, formed into a number of organisations based round the tenets of anarchism, socialism, libralism and communism).
I mentioned yesterday the expansion of the middle class being one of the great acheivements of the 20th century - the Spanish experience leading up to the civil war was of a society of a large (and often dispossessed) rural peasant class, and a large working class in the cities, presided over by a cabal of the aristocracy, the church and the large landowners; in many ways this was almost a feudal society, and it came smack up against the 20th century (the rise of Marxism, the organisation of labour via mass communication/dissemination of information), so it's not surprising then that something had to give.

Interestingly, one of the major movements on the Republican side was the anarchists, and I never really knew what they represented. Turns out that they were formed largely as a recation against the autocratic control of the state, and the anarchist ideal was not total disorder, but instead a system of locally organised co-operatives, making their own decisions and being mutually supportive of the rest of society. Where they tended to differ markedly from the socialists and the communists was that they had an abhorance of central government control, and didn't see the need for organisation at the level of the state. This gave them a bit of a problem when they had to form regional and central republican governments after the rise of the Nationalists, and many tended to abstain from taking part at all, which gave the small minority of communists their chance to seize power.

Given that the last attempt by nationalist factions to seize power was in 1981 (the parliament was held hostage under gun-point by the military, who tried to orchestrate a coup, and failed, largely due to King Juan Carlos' refusal to co-operate), it'll be interesting to see how far Spain has moved on from this situation. As they've been one of the fastest-growing economies in western Europe in the last twenty years or so, you'd hope that the chance of such divisions reappearing would be unlikely, if not impossible.

Have just made it to Edinburgh, after my longest day of cycling yet (60 miles - not a patch on the guy I met yesterday who, in his late 60s, had just knocked up a distance of 80 miles). Having got to Edinburgh, I figure that I can award myself a rest day, and there's plenty of things to check out here that warrent a day out of the saddle.

Just to bore everyone with accounts of additional wildlife I've seen, the list now includes: seagulls, terns, deer, a red kite, crows. There's also been lots of non wildlife, including sheep - white sheep with black faces and horns, black sheep, white sheep - lot's of different varieties, but I wouldn't have a clue which (contrary to stereotype, us Kiwis can't always tell the breed of a sheep at 50 yards).

Just checked Kate's blog, and it sounds like she's doing well too, having clocked up her first 100 kilometres (so only about another 700 odd to go then).

And, on the subject of blogs, Liam has added his presence, commenting on what's it's like to be an Englishman in Aoteoroa.

I've also been thinking: what are the most important developments of the twentieth century?
After thinking a bit, I've decided that the answers are not always the obvious ones. My first suggestions for what should be included in such a list include:

• the adoption of the automobile (technically developed in the 19th century, but it certainly hit critical mass in the 20th, and it's been interesting passing through older parts of the country, where the towns and villages were developed in the age of the horse - no such thing as ribbon development then, rather nicely clustered hamlets, at distances of maybe 3 to 5 miles).
• the expansion of the middle class (there was a time when most of the population of most countries were working class, and this produced obvious frictions with the minority ruling class, vis-a-viz the Russian Revolution and the rise of Marxism. Thankfully, now that - at least in the western world - pretty much most of us can be considered middle-class, society is not as extremely polarised as it once was, although of course there are still plenty of problems to be solved. This enlarged middle-class is what makes that one-(wo)man-one-vote system work, and you can see why the ruling class in past centuries was terrified of the concept of universal sufferage).
• Reinforced concrete (so much of today's architecture relies on this, and without it we wouldn't have buildings of the size and complexity, or bridges of the length that we now do. I'm not sure what the greatest single-span brick/stone bridge (i.e. not made with reinforced concrete) is, but I wouldn't be surprised if it was less than the width of a six lane motorway such as the M1)

Well, it's taken me five days of hard cycling to find an internet cafe, but I finally found one here in Berwick-on-Tweed.
I've been lucky enough to have pretty good weather for most of the trip to date, and have seen some stunning scenary cycling thorugh the Penines. In spite of all the hill-fear I started the trip with, the geography's been pretty good so far, with the only huge hill being that leading from Penrith up onto the Penines proper, and that was made up for by the cafe at the top that served the best scones I've had for years (both sultana AND cheese - yum!)

I'm amazed by the variety of wildlife I've been startling as I zoom down the road - I've seen rabbits, hares, water voles, curlews, lapwings, plovers, chaffinches, goldfinches, billfinches, frogs, herons, a weasel/stoat thingy, and the list goes on.
As well as all the fauna, there's plnety of flora as well, with lots of meadows of wild-flowers, especially buttercups (I'm not so good on naming plants, so won't attempt to here). It seems that June is a very good month indeed to be cycling round the countryside.

The countryside that I've been passing through is largely Geordie territory, and I'm amazed how almost everyone sounds like Jimmy Nail (or that guy that played Neville alongside Jimmy Nail in Auf Wedisain Pet, and more recently was in Peak Practice).
Scarily, I've even found myself thinking in Geordie, so maybe it's a good thing that I'll be crossing into Scotland tomorrow.

One of the best things I've discovered about cycling so far this trip is that it gives you the perfect excuse to indulge in pub-lunches and dinners without guilt. Speaking of which I'm feeling peckish for a pint of bitter and a plate of cod and chips...

Friday night's party was a great success - many thanks to all who attended, and especially to Gloria for a lovely (and totally unexpected) speech. We had some idea that many people would turn up for an hour or two and then drift off, but by the end of the night you would've found more room in a sardine can than on the Lock Tavern's roof terrace (we were blessed by the best weather of the year, making al-fresco drinking almost a necessity). I've yet to catch up on all the stories from the night (there was a posse heading off to the later-opening bars in Camden when we left), but I'm sure there was one or two suitably sore heads the next morning (Neeta? ;-)

Interesting poll in today's Guardian. Which would you choose from the following:

• An Olympic gold medal
• A knighthood
• The Body of Nicole Kidman
• The body of David Beckham
• The Booker Prize
• The Turner Prize
• £50,000
  

Turns out that the dosh is the overwhelming favourite, with people voting as follows:

• £50,000 (70%)
• An Olympic gold medal (9%)
• A knighthood (6%)
• The Body of Nicole Kidman (5%)
• The Booker prize (4%)
• The Turner prize (2%)
• The body of David Beckham (1%)

It says some interesting things about people's attitudes. Maybe we're not a nation of Philistines after all, with more people choosing the Turner prize over the body of David Beckham. Also, it looks like the body image thing is much more important for women (5% voting for Nicole Kidman's body) rather than men (only 1% for David Beckham's body).
As Kate pointed out, the lucrative choice on the list, for those of us that can string a few words together, would probably be the Booker prize, as any subsequent novel would be worth much more than £50,000. Also the Olympic medal would probably be worth much more in celebrity endorsement/after-dinner speaking fees.