Geoff Jones

After the recent walk where my Scarpa ZG65 XCR boots let me down by leaking, after a morning walking in heavy rain. I returned them to Open Air who agreed they were faulty and supplied me free of charge with a new pair.

I thought I would be smart and test the new boots before walking in them. I quickly made a test rig to hold the boots down in the sink to a depth of 120mm. Before immersion I weighed the insoles (about 28gm apiece), then repeated weighing after various immersion times. Here’s the results:-

As you can see the boots were pretty water tight for around 8 hours or so, after this the right boot leaked noticeably more than the left. Obviously this was a static test, in practice when walking you will get a pumping action so it will be interesting to see how they fare in the next rain walk.

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The Cambridge Primark opens tomorrow in Burleigh Street (the revamped John Lewis building ). To promote the opening of Primark they used today ten walking billboards as part of a targeted marketing campaign from Look Media UK. I thought it was highly effective and looked rather cool.

From Primark in Cambridge

Here is a little slideshow:-

Primark is the first major (Over 50,000 sq ft) new store in Cambridge since the opening of the Grafton Centre. There website for a job is here

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Yesterdays walk with the Cambridge Rambling Club was a good test for our foul weather gear, mine failed abysmally

We 11 started from St Mary’s Church car park at Rougham, in very wet and windy conditions, so it was heads down for the first 9 miles to Bradfield St Clare and a spot of lunch in the shelter of the church porch, followed by a drink at the Fox & Hounds in Bradfield St. George. The afternoon cleared up a little so we started to dry out.

From Rougham Walk

Very disappointing for me in that the left boot of my brand new Scarpa ZG65 XCR boots sprang a leak. So it’s back to Open Air with them today! My RAB Bergen jacket (QWA-05-RDB) was as useless as ever with little streams inside the arms and the pockets filling with water. It’s time has now come – I will return it to RAB. A quick survey of the other 10 people in our party  showed the Karrimor & Berghaus as highly effective, the Paramo did OK too but they are really heavy to lug around on extended walks.

Here is the walk and photographs:-

Rougham circular walk

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Update 021109 – Open Air agree boots are faulty , should have new pair by Friday

Tags: Cambridge Rambling Club, travel blog

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Here is Emily’s essay that has been causing her a bit of stress, I will leave the reader to guess what it is on:-)

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Geoff having Swedish Massage

What better after an invigorating walk than a relaxing Swedish Massage in the comfort of your own home, here in Cambridge, so many thanks to Sally for mine tonight. If you want to book a Swedish or Indian Head Massage then head over to Sally’s webpage and give her a call – she is in Cambridge most weekends.

Tags: cambridge, swedish massage

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Whilst on our walk today we came across this farm with the name The Pightle, Larry and I were fascinated by the origin of the name so out came the iPhone and a quick search on wiktionary revealed:-
“Odd-shaped fields now caused problems which had not been encountered in the days before mechanization. Thus, over several years, fields were reorganized to be acceptably rectangular.This was cleverly and thoughtfully arranged but,inevitably, there were remnants, leftovers,off-cuts or tailings. In most cases, these were small pieces of land,which were essentially triangular in shape. The locals probably referred to these pieces as “pigtails”. In Norfolk dialect,this would quickly become pronounced as “pightle”. In the 1920’s through the 1940’s,the word pightle was in fairly common usage but has fallen into disuse in recent years.”

Once at home I was able to consult my 1909 first edition of the complete English Dictionary. this had the following entry:-
So there we have it an old East Anglian word dating from 1200 meaning a small piece of enclosed land.

Tags: wordof the day

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Today’s travel blog is a ramble with the Cambridge Rambling Club. We did  a 14mile figure of 8 centered in Newport, Essex.

It was an warm autumn day, exactly 3 years since I met Sally on the fateful Nar Valley walk. The colours on the trees were truly splendid, especially when the sun came out and even the overcast skies gave a feeling of the dark winter nights which are about to descend on us. Much talk about log fires and stoves.

I was very surprised to hear Vera’s amazing news that her husband, Venkatraman Ramakrishnan, had just won the Nobel prize for Chemistry, here in Cambridge, and that they are about to visit the King and Queen of Sweden in Stockholm to collect the award and also will meet Barack Obama. An interesting aside for all those that want to curb immigration etc is that he was born in Chidambaram, Tamil Nadu, India emigrated to the USA and now lives in England, in fact he has only been at Trinity College, Cambridge for about 18months, who no doubt will collect all the kudos.

An excellent day out maybe we can get Murray Newlands to start walking and compliment his blogging skills!

Here is today’s outing on Everytrail:-

Newport, Essex, UK circular walk

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Tags: newport, Travel Blogging, Walk

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Blimey Cambridge is the 8th sexiest place in the UK, according to LoveHoney, spending over 3 times as much as the average UK city. Amusingly Cambridge is really, really hot on Sexy Shoes and Boots Now I know why Em wanted all those shoes with 6″ heels!

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Celebrity blogger, Murray Newlands was in Cambridge tonight, I missed him at The Twig (an offshoot of my friend, Lloyd Davis Tuttle group) meetup which was in The Vine not The Snug as advertised   I finally managed to get a drink with him in my local The Globe

We discussed a wide range of topics particularly my VanSpot idea and also re-categorising some of my posts into a category “Travel-Blogging“. Murray is well into social media having over 30,000 followers on Twitter plus doing many interviews with blogging personalities.

A good evening plus I got to chat, on Skype, with Emily who was excited about her lecture today were she learned about the Pavlov experiments that, apparently, resulted in pigeons trying to have sex with lightbulbs

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I’m surprised that more fuss is not been made over the privacy implications of the new Picasa3 face recognition software. It’s certainly superior to the Apple iPhoto offering. The most worrying aspect is that it allows you, well almost insists, that you link the photos to the persons email address. I wonder if Google are then taking the photo data and storing on there own servers?.

The image above is a collage of the 585 face images of me it has found on my main computer. Interestingly some are from group shots were it has picked me out of a large group!

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