Just like in the summer - when I don’t consider it a nice day unless there’s a blue sky all day long and not a cloud to be seen - I have similarly strict guidelines before I will recognise the fact that it’s winter. Until these criteria are met then I’ll just consider it autumn. I don’t care if the car gets frosty in the morning or the temperature drops below freezing at night. No, that won’t do at all. It has to snow and the snow has to lie during the day before I’ll consider it winter. It can be sunny from then on but until it snows it’s just not cricket.

So last night a friend and I were out night mountain biking on Barden Moor (for those of you who’ve not been there, it’s a moor north of Skipton and consists of a slog of a climb followed by several miles of entertaining descents). Actually, while I’m on the subject of night biking, remember to charge your super-bright lights fully. If you don’t you will find that half way around the route when you’re furthest from the car, your lights will fail and you’ll discover just how dark it is out there. You will either have a long and difficult hike back to the car (did I mention that you didn’t bring a spare light?) or have to stay within the light cast by your companion’s floodlights (which is tough when he’s a downhilling lunatic on a full suspension bike and you’re not). Still, lesson learned.

Anyway, it was a beautiful evening - albeit a chilly zero degrees celcius - but with the right clothes that’s not a problem. As we got to the high moor it gradually began to snow, which was pleasant. Then it gradually began to snow harder. Which was still nice - blasting down a rocky descent having to contend with patches of ice as well as large snowflakes falling all around made for a very memorable experience, and that’s without mentioning that it was the dead of night. Then it began to snow even harder still. Which was slightly less pleasant as the wind that came out of nowhere was directing the snow into my right ear. I have no objection to having my ear blown in by attractive women, but the cold breath of icy snow is not quite the same. Eventually we got back to the road following some quality and sustained descending (taking in a fork in the path I’d never noticed before which caused a bit of confusion). Then it really started to snow and as we pedalled straight into the wind for the last couple of miles to the car I could barely keep my eyes open thanks to the stinging snowflakes. Which was not pleasant.

It was only a dusting of snow really but still, we were probably the first people in Yorkshire to see and feel the first snow fall while most were watching Eastenders or huddling in front of the fire. Life, it’s grrrrrrreat! Oh, and if it snows enough I’ll take some pictures, there just isn’t enough for a decent picture yet unless I can be bothered hiking up the hills…

Update: I forgot to mention that while we were blasting down one of the descents a Red Grouse (noisy, below-average intelligence bird) decided to burst into flight while making a hell of a lot of noise just as we were passing. It flew a matter if inches above my friend’s head (he never even saw it) and by the time I got to it a second later it was perhaps a few feet above my head. I could see my lights reflecting off the daft bird’s eyes! It’s difficult to describe the shock of something like that jumping out at you in the dark making so much noise and almost taking you out. Had it stayed put we’d never have known it was there - so much for natural selection.

Being out of employment just now has taught me a lot about myself, and it’s only week three. A lot of people I know who hate their jobs complain that they either have to deal with irate people all day or don’t get the chance to use their brains or both. They complain about a mundane existence where they do the same thing day in day out, never feel any kind of progress or achievement and seem to be trapped in a rut and they hate knowing that.

Up until now I’ve been pretty lucky. As a software engineer I get to be creative. To solve problems and overcome challenges. I get to work towards objectives and feel an enormous (or not-so-enormous) sense of satisfaction when a software release goes out or a customer gets to use a new piece of functionality that I’ve written that makes their life 10 times easier. I could pick up a new tool or technology and apply it to something I’m working on and feel I’ve progressed. It’s mostly an intellectual challenge but being part of a motivated team working on the same product gives a sense of community and spirit that - despite impossible time-scales, irate customers or pointy haired bosses (been lucky with those too) - makes the whole thing worthwhile. The fact that I’m always learning helps to keep my brain going too.

However now that I’m out of work I don’t have any of that. But after many years of doing the job, it’s become as much a part of me as my hair and teeth. I don’t feel that my job or having a job provides my identity (for instance, if I won the lottery I would have no qualms about never working again), but I’ve quickly come to realise that without purpose I’m a bit lost.

I can’t just sit around all day watching interior design programmes. I can’t surf the net all day for porn, gossip, news or music (even with a broadband connection - who says Yorkshire is in the dark ages?). I can’t wander around shops for hours looking for nothing in particular. And I definitely can’t sit on the sofa drinking myself away to oblivion. I need something more than that. I need a reason.

It’s only now I realise that to be a halfway decent software engineer you have to be highly motivated and self-driven and love problem solving. You need to be able to work on your own as well as part of a team. You need to be constantly trying to learn and improve. And you have to be determined, have phenomenal attention to detail and be able to hold lots of things in your head at the same time. Or at least I do. In essence, you have to really be the person you describe on your CV (that’s resume for you North Americans). It’s not bullshit after all, it’s only now that I’ve been taken away from my job that I can really appreciate what drives me and why I enjoy it.

My own personal office.

So until I can persuade the right company that I am as good as I say I am (which is another story entirely) I need to keep doing what I’ve been doing for all these years. I need to write some software. I was writing software long before I chose it as a career and will probably be doing it long after I finish. Oh, if only I’d had this drive for football I might be rich by now! Okay, I admit that’s pretty unlikely.

So as well as job hunting I’m going to write some web-based software I’ve fancied having a shot at for a while but never had the chance. If nothing else it’ll keep me away from watching House Invaders, To Buy or Not To Buy, Big Strong Boys, Trading Up, Cash In The Attic, Countdown and all the rest…

Well, I’ve just completed my first week of being unemployed. I had a nice picture of what it was going to be like, pretty much along the lines of the lead character of About A Boy (which is a good film starring Hugh Grant). I was going to divide the day up into units of time and fill them up with things like eating lunch, playing snooker, watching home improvement programmes, surfing the net and mainly taking it easy. Wasn’t to be.

No, instead I got my punishment for spending December in New Zealand and flying business class. I got a stinking cold. I get perhaps one cold every two years or so and I don’t take kindly to them. I’m not one of these guys who curls up into a ball and cries for my mother, I tend to try and fight the damn thing and make it effect my life as little as possible.

So my week consisted of headaches, blowing my nose, coughing for several hours a day, mixing cocktails of drugs from throat lozenges to painkillers to cough medicine with varying degrees of success. Not the ideal start to my new [temporary] life of leisure. My plan of starting to paint the house fell by the way-side along with some serious job hunting. Never mind, new week - new attitude! In a couple more days I should be rid of this annoying cough and the associated phlegm and should be able to get on with making the most of this enforced rest. On the plus side though, coughing fits are excellent exercise for the abdominal muscles - they beat crunches any day!

I’m finally sufficiently over the post-holiday blues to write about my trip to New Zealand. In one word it was fantastic. I expected to be impressed with the place, enjoy the scenery and like the people (I know a few Kiwis and they’re all thoroughly nice people). I’d also seen photos, slide shows, spoken to people who live / lived / will be living there and read portions of the Lonely Planet guide so I had a pretty good idea of what to expect. But nothing was going to prepare me for what I saw and how much I would love the place.

If you can’t be bothered reading my account then skip to the photographs here.

After our few days in Singapore we flew to Christchurch on the south island. Expecting to be jet-lagged we’d booked ourselves into a hotel for the first two nights before staying with friends who’ve just moved back over. They would be our base of operations. But travelling business class with those amazing flat folding beds we felt surprisingly well. Apart from having a few early nights you’d never have known we’d just flown around the world. So we had a bit of time to wander around Christchurch (the main city in the island with a population of around 330,000) and get used to the place. The sun was shining (a John Conners nice day no less) and we were ready for an adventure.

Our hosts suggested a driving route. We’d go with them over to the west coast (nicknamed the Wet coast on account of the high rainfall but we weren’t to see any of that) and stay at Punakaiki for a couple of days. Then we’d part company and while they went home to Christchurch my girlfriend and I would begin a road trip all the way around the south of the south island in an anti-clockwise direction taking in some of the main sights and places to see before returning to Christchurch. If you think New Zealand is small then you’re dead wrong. We spent nearly two weeks driving around the south of the south island covering about 3000km and hardly saw anything! You could spend a lifetime exploring the place.

I’m not going to give a blow-by-blow account of the trip because I could write a novel about it (you know how I like to be a bit long-winded at times) but I’ll save some of the stories for those “have I told you about the time…?” moments. The main highlights for me included going to Queenstown, the extreme sports capital of the world, where bungee jumping was invented, and going on a steamboat ride! Awesome. We went whale watching in Kaikoura, sat and looked at breaking waves for hours on many different sandy beaches, went to several sites that Lord of the Rings was filmed (including the mountain range in the opening scene of The Two Towers), went into the heart of Fiordland (literally a wilderness of sheer mountains, trees growing on cliffs and scale that is beyond human comprehension).

But the most jaw-dropping moment for me was a trip out Milford Sound. You see, I love mountains. And Milford Sound is surrounded by mountains. The drive from Te Anau to this isolated place is amazing. You go from flat country to alpine terrain to cliffs the likes of which I’d never seen. We stopped at one point and the more I turned my head to look at the mountains around us the more amazed I was. There were so many cliffs and tough, glacier carved terrain that I was in geologist’s heaven. Of course when we actually got to Milford Sound and went out on the water I was even more blown away. As you’ll see from the photos, the mountains rise almost uninterrupted from the water as sheer cliffs. What is difficult to put into perspective is just how large they are. There’s nothing to give you scale until you get really close to them and look straight up to realise that these impenetrable mountains are actually a mile high. Jaw-dropping. And I’ve seen the Grand Canyon so I know what big is.

My main take-home point from the holiday isn’t the scenery (which was incredible). It’s not the weather (which was pretty good the whole time). And it’s not the mountain biking terrain (which is excellent). It was the lack of people. Coming back to the UK it amazes me that so many people can live in such close proximity without more trouble than there is. A lot of the things that I hate about the UK would instantly go away if there were less people. The laid-back lifestyle that we adapted to in New Zealand is to a large extent a product of lower population. Even the city of Christchurch is so spread out and filled with parks and gardens that it has a really non-city feel to it. All this terrorism threat, fear-inducing news reporting and paranoia has turned the UK into a pretty miserable place really. It took a while but I stopped caring about the outside world while I was away and I liked it. After all, I’m just living my life and I’ll be damned if I’m going to live it in fear. It’s too short and precious. Hang on, maybe I’m not entirely over the post-holiday blues…

The end result of the holiday has been quite unexpected. I didn’t think I’d be re-evaluating where and how I’m going to spend the rest of my life. But I am. Watch this space.

Anyway, check out my New Zealand Photo Album. I know there are a lot of me but I didn’t want to blow other people’s anonymity here. I took dozens and these are just a snippet of them.