The best thing about Findhorn Beach, apart from the soft sand, fancy beach huts and fascinating WW2 MOD fortifications is that if the weather is foul you can always swim instead in Findhorn Bay. See reports here and here. That way you can check the beach to see if conditions are okay for swimming and, if not, you can still swim in the sheltered calm of the bay. However, for this visit, the sea was flat calm, the skies were blue, the thermometer was hitting 20 and Findhorn was doing a good job of imitating the Caribbean. I couldn’t have had better conditions or a location for a sea swim.

REVIEW

Ease of Access: There’s plenty of parking beside the beach. There used to be a sign that warned that parking costs £1. However, I’d never paid anything and nothing happened and now it’s disappeared so I’m assuming that parking is now free.

There’s plenty of grass beside the car park and it’s easy to walk to the beach, even barefooted.

Water quality: Very clear. There’s also plenty of room to swim before the beach starts to drop away. You can easily move away from shore and still, not only see the bottom, but also find places to stand and keep your head above water. The water temperature was c15 degrees.

Swim Quality: Excellent – at high tide, the sea was calm and there were views straight across the Moray Firth. Watch out for the estuary though – someone has told me it has a “whopping great whirlpool”, not sure if that’s true but I’d definitely avoid swimming near it and head east along the beach only.

Other People: Findhorn Beach is popular but, at more than five miles long there’s plenty of quiet spots away from entrance to the car park.

Would I go back: Yes.

How many times have you been asked to sponsor someone? Whether it’s a marathon, a bungee jump or growing a moustache, we are asked all the time to give money for a good cause. In return, we promise to say “Well done!” when the race is over, the bungee rope holds or the moustache looks more like Henry Cavill in Mission Impossible than Henry the Hoover after vacuuming the hairs around a barber’s chair. And that’s it. Nothing else needed. Hand over cash, say congratulations. There’s nothing else to do. Because why would you do anything else? It’s a donation to charity. You don’t expect to get if refunded, do you..?

Until a few years ago, I’ve never thought to check up on the sponsored person. I’ve never checked whether someone has ran around London or abandoned their razor. I just pay my money and I forget about it until I see an email saying “Thank you!”

Even if they don’t complete the race, or even start, or if they remain bumfluff free for the next six months, I wouldn’t never go back and ask for my money back. So why am I talking about it now? I’m talking about it because at the weekend I was reminded that when I raised money for driving from Plymouth to the Gambia, and the car broke down on day one – see the race diaries – someone asked for their sponsorship money back.

“I heard you crashed out,” they said when I met them a few days after returning home.

“Well, we didn’t crash,” I said, “the engine just failed. There was nothing we could do. The car couldn’t travel faster than 10mph. We could have kept going but we’d still be driving to Africa next year, if we stayed in the car. We had no choice but to quit.”

“So you don’t finish it?” They asked.

“No, we didn’t finish it” I said.

“In that case, can I have my money back?”

They’d sponsored me £50. Or more accurately they’d sponsored Action for Children fifty pounds.

I thought they were joking so I said: “Would you like interest on that too?”

And they said, in the same tone they would speak to their bank manager: “no, the interest would be next to nothing. I only gave you the money two weeks ago. You can keep the interest.”

“That’s kind of you,” I said but that’s not what I was thinking, they genuinely wanted their money back.

“You can pay tomorrow,” they said, “otherwise I will have to charge interest.” And they weren’t joking when they said that.

And I paid them because what other choice did I have? We had asked for sponsorship to reach Africa and we’d only spent one hour in France before the car broke down. They were quite right to ask for their money back. We’d been sponsored to travel, not sponsored to quit.

That’s why it’s important when receiving any sponsorship request to write back immediately with a lists of conditions for your sponsorship. The first, of course, being that any money gifted is conditional of them completing the event. The second is that interest WILL APPLY if any refund is not paid within 48 hours. The third is that you know a man who will kick their door if they don’t pay.

I guarantee these conditions will mean you will never lose money again when sponsoring someone – because you will never again be asked again to sponsor anyone.

My main aim for the year was to take part in Celtman Solo Point Five, and the stats reflect that. The longest ride, highest climb and longest swim are all from that race. With a dodgy foot for part of the year I was also pleased to get a 15 mile run but not so pleased that I think that was the reason I hurt my foot and meant I couldn’t run during April and May.

Overall, I was more active, went further and climbed higher than in 2022, though not my much. But with injuries, I’m just pleased I managed to take part in Celtman – even though I was among the last to cross the finish line. Read about it here.

Many thanks again to all visitors, regular readers, casual browsers, specific kinksters who are into TwinBikePorn but Google autocomplete sent them to the wrong site, and anyone might just have accidentally found themselves here.

2023 saw the website visited over 13,000 times and saw a steady increase in new visits and visitors from around the world.

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One month. Playing every day. What have I learned?

• Pianos have 72 keys. That might sound obvious. But it’s more complicated that it sounds. Pianos have 72 keys but I only play 17 of them. 8 white keys to the right of ‘middle C’ – the middle key of the piano. And the 8 white keys to the left of them. And one black key (as part of a D chord). I don’t play the keys at the bottom of the piano and I don’t play the keys at the top. The reason for this is that the eight keys repeat. As do the black keys (of which there are seven). But in order to learn I’ve started with 16 and my muscle memory is starting to learn how to shape my fingers and move my arm for those 16 keys. Maybe by the end of the year, I’ll have played one of the other keys. But, for the moment, 16 keys is a lot less intimidating than 72. But if I want to stretch myself when learning, then I will have to… stretch myself and reach further.
• Chords are easy and hard. Just as you master one chord, you add a second and try and move between them. Then add a third and watch your coordination fly out of the window. But practice helps, and soon you’ve learned to move between three chords – and then you add a fourth and it takes even longer to practice as there’s a lot more movements between all four. There is a reason it takes a long time to master a piano and it’s entirely down to having too many chords. If we had fewer fingers it would be easier to learn as we’d have less chords.
• I’m not interested in classical pieces. Chopin? Borin’, more like…! But I do like film music and playing along with soundtracks.
• I’m left handed – but not what it comes to playing the piano. I’m still learning how to use my left hand, it’s not as instinctive as my right.
• There’s no one way to learn. I started the same day as my wife but we’ve both learnt how to play in different ways by following different training paths on the Simple Piano app. She’s now playing classical pieces, I’m playing along to pop songs. Neither approach is wrong but it does show how encouraging it is to be able to learn in a way that interests you. If I’ve followed her path, I might not have loved learning as much as I did. Same for her. The fact we can choose our own way to learn is a great feature of Simply Piano and one I would recommend to others.
• Most of all, I’ve learned I love playing the piano and want to try now and learn something from a soundtrack which will starts to challenge me to use both hands and which should be within my reach after one month. Something like this…

After 31 days I’m not a level 0 but…

C’mon! Some of these levels don’t even have the tune. You wouldn’t know it was Twinkle Twinkle Little Star. This should be called 3 levels of Twinkle Twinkle and “4 levels of plinkity plonkity look how fast I can move my hands no tune tinkling”.

One of the most useful videos I’ve watched about how chords work.

(I’m at level 1 but after 29 days of playing, I can understand level 8, something I couldn’t have done before starting).

I didn’t spot it right away, but I can’t help but hear it now. Every song on Simply Piano is a cover. 

It seems appropriate. Everyone using the app is covering the song too. But it does make it seem like it’s training me less to be a solo pianist and more to be playing Uptown Girl in a wedding band.

When I look at the keys I see the computer game, Tetris. There are serveral falling blocks and each block is a different shape. You can rotate the blocks, you make them fall faster or slow them back down, but every second, you’re trying to make the blocks fit together in harmony, in an unbroken straight line.

With the piano, I imagine my fingers as the blocks, there’s several shapes but with four fingers and a thumb there’s only a limited number of shapes I can make with them. Each one of those shapes is a chord, and if I can only move them around the piano, sometimes faster, sometime slower, I can make them all fit together in harmony.

Which sounds simple in practice, like Tetris. But harder and harder in practice as one mistake means it’s game over.