World of more

"Squeeze your buttocks. Good. Now relax to 50%. Good. 75%. Good. 25%. Excellent." In an attempt to correct knee pain picked up during an arduous summer of half-marathons, 100km walks and Alpine mountaineering, I have engaged a physio to prod and embarrass me on a weekly basis. Alison is making me work on my core muscles to provide better support for my knock-kneed pipe-cleaner legs with their tendency to let my feet over-pronate, my knees roll inwards and me generally run like a girl. "OK, now just tense your left buttock. No, not both, just the one." I can't, it's either all buttocks or none, not some mix of the two. How can this be? I'm a master at graceful movement through the virtual domains of my work and leisure hours, as at ease piloting the Master Chief around the battlefields of Halo 2 as I am at vaulting along the main highways and quieter backwaters of the internet. I can make my PC sing and could tell within a moment if it had sp...

My top-floor Linhope bedroom, full of clutter, home of a mattress that bears the scars of battles with heavy sleepers and bedroom gymnasts since long before I was born, moonlights (literally) as an observatory. Some time ago a previous resident took a brush and some luminous paint and, with an eye for the stars, painted dots on the ceiling. No tacky five-point stars or smiling man in the moon for this Marylebone Michelangelo, they accurately recreated the uneven distribution of brightness and density that the true night skies exhibit. A few large, bright blobs, many of average size, and the occasional tiny, turn-your-head-to-see-properly, pinpricks. The simple genius of the effect is that the dots are invisible under normal light; neither daylight nor bedside lamp allow for a viewing. Only when all lights are off and the sole light source is London's perma glow filtered through the curtains does the room turn into a mini planetarium. Most times I forget about the ersatz stars th...

The word most frequently used towards the end of Trailwalker is "broken". In the context of a 100km walk it means fatigued, exhausted, pained, as in "my legs are broken", "my feet are broken", or more commonly "I'm broken". Walking Trailwalker is like being crushed by a glacier: the pain is slow, inexorable, inevitable, and it chafes a bit. Covering 100km on shanks' pony is a strange endeavour, 62 miles is a prepostorously long distance and 20 hours a ludicrous time to be walking. It's almost impossible to imagine what it's like without taking part. Picture yourself walking for eight hours; enough to cover about twenty-five miles and a decent day walk in most people's book. At the end of that eight hours your feet tingle, your legs are slightly stiff, you're a bit hungry. If you're doing Trailwalker you're not even half way around. With three 25 mile training walks under my belt I figured I could cover 40 miles ...

A rare conjunction of Barry's insistent nagging, an evaluation copy of Dreamweaver and some slack time in the office has let me finally get around to writing up a couple of walking trips I went on a few months back. Present, in all their winter glory, are a December weekend in the Lake District and a February ice-climbing trip to Scotland .

The audience at an Orbital gig is not a representative microcosm of modern multicultural British society. There's no young club kids, no crusties, no lager-louts and few women. Rather it's composed of old school ravers and those almost fashionable, slightly geeky guys that try just a bit hard; the bloke from the IT department that doesn't talk about Star Trek but still knows his way around a computer; the mate in the pub who is always pleased to show off the latest phone or PDA. They shop for the modern gadgets and hip t-shirts, but always carry themselves with the knowledge that no matter how hard they try, they still don't *feel* cool. People like me. That's good because the Hartnoll brothers are the same. Album covers featuring diagrams of electron orbitals , iconic on-stage headwear that is nevertheless a victory of function over form; Orbital are not a fashionable band. They've never had the shouty bandwagon success of fellow "dance" acts ...

A near permanent feature of the lounge of my parent's house was the pile of yellowing newspapers that eclipsed the radiator by the patio doors. My father, never one to miss a bargain or price saving even if that meant spending more money buying an unrequired item in a sale, had a subscription to The Times paid for almost entirely through vouchers. Every day another couple of sections would splash onto the door mat and be placed on the pile for reading at a convenient moment. Convenient moments were unfortunately rare, and over time the absence of reading eyes to convert the newspapers into tinder suitable for firestarting let the unread pile tower ever higher, and even though the low-lying strata in the stack of press were old enough to be reporting Queen Victoria's funeral, he refused to throw any of them out without first reading them. I laughed at his inability to let print go unwitnessed, and threatened to surreptitiously remove papers over the course of weeks until the...

Slipping out of the back of my twenties and into my early thirties is being marked with an increasing participation in events designed to measure the performance of my body: half marathons, 10km runs, pizza eating races. Some friends charitably ascribe it to a decreased fear of looking an idiot in front of others, I reckon it's more likely an attempt to prove that I may be older and saggier, but I still *got it*. Whatever. This year's primary event is the ridiculously gruelling Trailwalker . 100km, 30 hours, no sleep, walk or run. Boo's done it twice, Baz has done it once, I swore I never would, but now, for reasons probably little removed from raw machismo, I'm lining up with them on July 17th. The event supports Oxfam and all the work they do to alleviate poverty, and the Gurkha Welfare Trust and their work supporting ex-Gurkha's in Nepal. Online sponsorship is possible here , so please join me in whipping out a credit card and spreading some love (I've ...

Dartmoor was large enough to swallow up two thousand keen teens, eight hundred volunteers and enough Army helicopters to re-enact the Falklands War plus assorted ramblers taking advantage of the hottest weekend of the year and still leave a little corner quiet and free enough for four of us to wildcamp in peace. We picked a spot on some flat grass in the elbow of a river bend, sheltered from the light breeze by high banks. The suntrap formed by the topography was warm enough to keep us in shorts and t-shirt until the sun finally fell below the rocky lip of the surrounding landscape. With the sun's rays gone we pulled on fleeces and down jackets, hats and gloves, cooked up noodles, and, when conversation had run out, retired to bed before it got dark The bright red Gore-Tex tube of my bivi bag looked like it wouldn't keep out a light breeze, let alone the sudden chill of an early May night, but lined with Therm-a-rest and sleeping bag full of 800g of goose down it was cosy e...

Ach, I'm stressed. My mind is inefficiently swirling with a million thoughts, .."phone James".."write presentation".."prepare for meeting"..and my dizzily spinning brain wakes me at 5am to emboss worries on the black escape of sleep. The sheer volume of individual concerns renders me busy but oh so inefficient, I can't focus on any task long enough to complete it properly. The reasons for my stress are as manifold as they are anonymously dull; incompetent co-workers, underscoped work, potential professional failure; any job could generate such bland trivialities, and many of my previous projects have done so. The slight, annoying, difference this time is I am aware of my stress while it happens rather than recognising it through the dazzle-reducing lens of hindsight. Great, now I have stress about stress, meta-stress, to vex me further. To relax I try to snag my mind on other distractions, to make the unproductive loop of thoughts jump the menta...

Visitors are always welcome; that's what I said at the bottom of my previous post, and Tokyo-based ex-pat friend Euan took me at my word. A year-long e-mail silence was broken by my Oriental chum, announcing not his arrival in London, but that of one of his close friends. "Could you put Mochi up for a night?" he requested. I hesitatantly accepted, not through any sense of meanness on my part, but because I always feel conflicted when offering accommodation. It's good to be generous, random acts of kindness can only improve the world and my karma; but on the other hand I'm slightly embarrassed that Linhope doesn't really reflect the kind of slick professional image I think it should portray. By my age I fully expected to be living in an airy penthouse apartment; imported maple floors, more windows than walls, a bed the size of Kent; making Margaritas in a brushed metal cocktail shaker for my playwright friends and journalist lovers as the sun set through th...

A photographic pan around Linhope's large, if messy, front room, taken from my regular seat. It is Sunday 8th February at approximately 10pm. Features of note in the photograph (from left): The giraffe on the TV . A full time Linhope resident whose presence predates me. The innominate cuddly ungulate no longer registers on my conscious brain, but is, without fail, the second property of Linhope that new visitors pass comment on. The Television . Almighty and Omniscient Purveyor of Magick and Goode. We, impotent subjects, are in Its thrall, blank canvasses onto which The Television projects whatever It wishes us to see. It is currently displaying snooker for our betterment. Dinner . The empty pizza boxes below The Television represent a full weekend's worth of dining from the official Linhope caterer - GoGo Pizza (0207 402 4022). The Sofa . A spectacularly uncomfortable example of a cheap sofa-bed. Lurking deep within its sprung bowels are fabulous arrays of wealth in ...

The cathartic urges detailed below persisted when I returned to Linhope and extended to a thorough review of my record collection. Of the roughly four hundred 12" singles I have collected in the last five years at least fifty are now surplus to my DJing needs. There seems little point in sticking them on eBay or giving them to Oxfam (my guess is the average Oxfam visitor is not hunting for some three year old Dutch trance on an obscure record label) so I'm going to give them away to people that want them. I've detailed the full list here . If you want any of these records drop me a mail to simon at worldofmore dot com and we'll sort something out. I don't want any money other than to cover postage, although I have Amazon or HMV wishlists if you're feeling generous.

For reasons now lost to me, at the age of fifteen I considered it a good idea to move my limited possessions from the large, spacious bedroom I occupied on the sunny side of my parent's house to the small L-shaped room under the eaves at the front. Perhaps it was so that I could be different to my younger sister whose room was alarmingly exactly the same dimensions as mine, maybe it was so that our playroom would be larger, I can't remember. Whatever the reason, sixteen years later the room is still mine. I effectively moved away from home at 19 (and again at 23), but I left a large number of my belongings in that cramped bedroom and have never fully reclaimed them. The bookshelves which once supported all the books I'd read still groan under what is now a fraction of the books I own, the wardrobe that used to hold all of my, frequently ill-advised, clothing now holds only those garments I have little use for. Patiently, my parents have put up with my inability to declu...