I wish... I still printed my photos and put them in albums (part 5)

I have seen TV adverts for companies that print photos in a book format. So I recognised the name Photobox when my friend Rhian sent me a link to her album on their website.

Rhian's photobook is called Costa Rica 2014 and it has one hundred pages of gorgeous colour photographs that capture Rhian's holiday with her husband and two teenage children. It looks stunning on my laptop. The hard copy must look even better. 

"Wait until they do an offer," Rhian advised me.

Really? Wait? Do I have to? Surely their prices aren't that unreasonable.

I looked. 

One hundred and three pounds, twenty five pence! For one book of photographs!

Blow that, I thought. I'll wait.

I went back to my photo memory cards, loaded the next one into my camera, and uploaded the photos onto my laptop. I did it again, and again, and again. I was on a roll. 

It turns out that memory cards have grown in memory size over the years. The further I went back in time, the fewer the number of photos on each card. It wouldn't take me months to upload them after all.

In a matter of hours I'd uploaded six memory cards. Spring 2009 to Autumn 2011.

The Standing Stones of Stenness, and me. During a half term holiday in May 2011 my ex and I travelled to the Scottish Highlands, Orkney Isles and Shetland Isles. I saw incredible historical sights such as this, and awesome wildlife such as puffins and seals.

Even more incredible is that we travelled to Inverness and back by Megabus and were still a couple afterwards.

Venice in February 2010 was beautiful, busy and very, very cold. The festival was in full swing. Costumes everywhere. But on the outer islands it was quiet. This deserted industrial wharf was so different to the picture postcard image of Venice that I had to take a photo of it.

I worked at Ofsted for three years at their Head Office in Holborn. Whatever you might think about the organisation, the people who worked there were lovely (if I do say so myself). 

For a short while there was a Golden Age of Friday nights out. One of them was karaoke. This is Hussein and his best friend AJ giving it the X Factor.

In the summer of 2009 I attended Wolfsonfest. Never heard of it? It's a tiny annual festival held in a different location every year, depending on where the organiser, my friend Alex Wolfson, wants to to take his friends on holiday.

One of the attendees was Kelly, seen playing table football in the photograph. It was at this particular Wolfsonfest that Kelly announced she was going out with AJ (see previous photo). This confused me greatly, because for the past two years I had thought Kelly was a lesbian.

She wasn't. Which amused Kelly greatly.

The Twelve Days of Christmas pub crawl, December 2009. One of the things I enjoyed doing when I lived in London was organising all-day fancy dress pub crawls for me and my friends. This was a familiar sight; the weird and wonderful strolling and chatting leisurely behind me while I did the map reading and general cajoling.

In June 2009 my friends Patrick and Dominika got married in Warsaw and I was fortunate enough to be invited. It was a brilliant wedding, despite the compulsory shots of vodka, and I stayed in the top notch hotel where the wedding reception took place. 

Unfortunately, the unconscious man in this photo did not, and I foolishly offered to escort him back to his hotel so that he didn't die on the mean streets of a foreign city. It was the longest hour and a half of my life. He didn't recognise his own hotel, he'd lost his key and he couldn't remember his room number. He swore at me and everybody else. And he kept falling over.

Never. Again.

For my friend Emma's 30th Birthday in 2009 we dressed up as heroes and villains and went out in Brighton. I went as a banker. This was less than a year after the collapse of Lehman Brothers and the economic sh**storm that followed. You can tell I was impressed.

Later that evening I was thrown out of a bar for wearing a hat. By a security man... who was wearing a hat. When I say he threw me, I mean he grabbed me by the scruff of my black trench coat and flung me onto the pavement. Incredible. I hope he did it to real bankers too.

In April 2009 I met up with my friends Ruth and Guy in Bali, Indonesia. They had been travelling around the world for six months. I had been travelling for ten days; a week in Thailand and a long weekend in Singapore.

Every day in Bali I rode pillion on a moped ridden by a topless guy whose back was sunburnt and peeling. Gross. Bali was beautiful though. Walking back from a boat trip I caught sight of dozens of Indonesian fishermen and their boats.

I only have four memory cards left to download. Will I finish uploading the photographs on them and design a photobook for printing by the end of the month?

What do you wish you could finish by the end of January? Could you make the extra effort this week?

I wish... I could street dance (part 2)

Doing something for the first time is less scary than thinking about doing it.

Last Thursday I attended my first street dance lesson. I stood at the back of the room behind rows of other dancers and faced mirrors that entirely covered the opposite wall. The instructor pressed play on his MP3 player and stood at the front. He counted us in: "One two three four-"

...

Six days earlier, the morning after I announced my new wish, I caught sight of my reflection in the bathroom mirror. My hair had receded another inch overnight, I was sure of it. 

I can't learn to street dance, I thought. I'm too old! 

My friends were kind. Online, a few of them said they liked my wish and that I was very brave. To my face, they said nothing. 

Then the videos came... One friend sent me a video called Rock Stars Dancing Like Your Dad, which should have been called A Dad Dancing Like Rock Stars In His Back Yard In Fast Forward. Another forwarded me Burning Star Sampoornesh Babu Love Scene, in which a tubby mustachioed singer heel-kicks a meteorite and twerks at the camera.

Oh no, I thought, that's going to be me. An embarrassment. Ridiculous. A bad dancer.

I was undecided about whether to go to the street dance lesson until I received an email from Annalies at Marina Studios on Monday, asking me to confirm which class I wanted to attend. Adult street dance on Thursday at 9pm, I emailed back. There. Done. No going back. You will do this Richard.

Thursday evening came quickly. I psyched myself up. I stuck a Street Dance CD in the ghetto blaster (old skool!) and jumped around my room. Come on then, let's do this!

What am I going to wear? Crap. Should have thought about this earlier. I revisited the website. It recommended loose clothing like leggings or shorts. Hmm. My shorts are all Bermuda-style or khaki. No good. I remembered I had some black tracksuit bottoms with my cycling gear. They were a bit buffed and shiny in the crotch, but they would do.

Next? A T-shirt. Easy. I've got a Quiksilver T-shirt with polaroid-style pictures of a skateboarder on it. Doing jumps. On a street. It's so street that it's got an actual street on it. 

I put it on. It looked... wrong. And the off-white colour looked bland over my tracksuit bottoms. What about a black T-shirt? No, stupid. Black over black? I'd look like a ninja. Eventually I chose a bright orange T-shirt with a garish pattern and oversized brand name. Perfect.

Finally, trainers. Got. One pair of white Nike runners. Sorted.

All that remained was to make my head look acceptable. I put contact lenses in, poked at my hair with wax, and plucked unwanted hairs out of other places. Especially grey ones. It was a futile attempt to pass myself off as twentysomething, but by God I would give it my best shot.

I was running late, but at last I was ready. I took a photo to record the moment. If I hadn't felt so nervous, I would have smiled.

I drove to Brighton in a hurry. It was dark and rainy outside but inside I was singing and dancing to my Street Dance CD. It would be OK. It would be OK.

To my dismay, the entrance to Marina Studios was glowing with unflattering fluorescent light. Through the floor to ceiling windows I could see small groups of young women standing about or reclining on sofas. I walked straight past them to the reception and tried not to imagine them pointing and laughing at my emerging bald spot.

Fifteen minutes later I was standing in a dance studio. I had been ignored by two women sitting nearest to me in the waiting area but I had summoned up enough courage to introduce myself to another man. His name was Richard as well, which helped break the ice. 

I also got talking to a woman in the queue called Piya (I am guessing at the spelling), another mature first-timer. Although the average age in the class was between 20 and 30, there were at least two women in their forties or fifties. Piya and I had been worried about being the oldest. Now we were there, we didn't feel old at all.

It helped that the dance instructor, JP, was no teenybopper either. But he could move fast and loose and he pushed us very hard to do the same. In a fun way though, with lots of jokes. I laughed a lot. At him, but also at myself. In my very first street dance lesson JP got me boyband sliding, hip rotating, spin jumping and bum wiggling. I have no idea what it looked like but it was a lot of fun to do.

At the end of the lesson JP split the class into two groups. Why? To perform to each other! I felt incredibly self-conscious, but I focussed on remembering the sequence of moves we had learned to the song Get On Up by James Brown. I wasn't a complete disaster - I hope - but my solid start gradually unravelled until I was flailing about one beat behind the regular dancers. I finished with a flourish though, leaping and then sliding to a stop.

I was drenched in sweat. We all were. One hour of intense dance will do that to you. We gave ourselves a round of applause, fetched our bags and said our goodbyes. Piya asked me if I would be back next week. Definitely, I said.

The next lesson is tomorrow.

What is your wish of the month? What could you do for the first time instead of just thinking about it?

I wish... I cycled to work (part 5)

Be inspired by professionals. Don't compare yourself with them.

The Tour of Britain came to my home town on Saturday. In honour of this week-long race for professional cyclists, Uckfield pulled out all the stops; roads were closed, bunting strung up, crowds turned out, and our community radio station went into overdrive.

I waited on a hill outside of town with my sister Rachel, her husband Terry and my nephew and niece. Mark was also there with his better half Wendy. We cheered and waved flags and took photos. And that was just for the police motorbikes.

I watched in awe as the cyclists cruised up the hill. They were halfway though a 226 kilometre stage. That's approximately 141 miles. 141 miles!!! 

They made it look effortless.

Back home, I watched the conclusion of the race on television. A helicopter-mounted camera streamed footage of the riders racing into Brighton at breakneck speed for mile after mile. I couldn't believe what I was seeing.

How do they do that?

Needless to say, I was inspired by what I saw. So much so that, during my ride this evening, I imagined myself attacking up Ditchling Beacon and sprinting along Madeira Drive to win the stage.

Reality didn't quite match the fantasy. I hit a couple of potholes, the zip on my saddle bag broke, and I spat gnats. But I did move one step closer to being able to cycle to work and back:

I cycled 29.10 miles!

No comparison with the professionals. But then I'm not comparing my ride with theirs. Or that of other cyclists. I'm comparing it with my first ride of the month. At twice the distance, it makes me feel pretty good. :-)

What is your wish of the month? Wouldn't you like to see yourself improve?