Priest in the Church of England. Father, husband, son. Keen biker.
oh yes baby
From Crave
I mean… come on… 9 inch screen, £300, 1gb RAM, up to 12gb Flash based HD… get me one now!
In fact, Asus, I’ve pretty much sold an entire truck load of the 7inch versions for you, so just ship me the 9 inch now and then I’ll review it here.
Go on… you know you want to.
I’m not sure when it happened, but all of a sudden I seem to be a potcher. Anytime I find myself twiddling my thumbs I gravitate to the garage where I start taking things appart and attempting to make them better.
It may seem harmless, but my poor motorbike is getting a little sick of having everything taken off and messed with. I keep finding myself looking at sites that advocate building your own pannier systems.
I think it all stems back to that mech engineering apprenticeship I did when I left school, it still feels like only yesterday but as my father reminded me this weekend it was 12 years ago. The motorbike mechanics course at Merton also has a part to play, and Stace has just started a welding course at Hammersmith that I think I may sign up for next term.
The garage is pretty much complete now, the work bench is finally in, all that remains is to wire in the electrics (to the bech), pipe in the compressor and complete the shelving for the fridge and microwave….. oh my dear Lord… I am turning into my father.
Well as if a 5,000 mile trip to Russia wasn’t enough for me I’ve signed up for a special day out in June!
I’m going to use it as a bit of ‘light’ training…
Myself and some friends from www.xrv.org.uk will be attempting to ride from John O’Groats to Lands End on 21st June 2008 – the longest day of the year. It’s approx 870 miles in total depending on the route. All in a day starting at about 4:30 am and finishing outside the Lands End Hotel – hopefully before midnight….
Why on earth would I want to subject myself, and in particular my rear end, to 850 miles plus in the saddle in one day? Well as I said it’s good practice for Russia but more importantly it’s to raise money for Macmillan Cancer Support. Macmillan work to support people with cancer and their families. They provide doctors, nurses and other specialists in hospitals and help families and loved ones cope with caring for someone with cancer.
Our Russia trip is raising the profile of Everyman a group fighting male type cancers and this trip is helping a group dedicated to helping people cope with disease.
Here’s a link to our Just Giving Page …. I’m looking forward to doing this run and I’ll be thinking of The Old Man on the way
I wrote a short piece over at journeytorussia about how touched I’ve been by the donations we’ve received for Everyman. The thing that has struck me has been the amount of money people have parted with – Everyman is an amazing charity that makes sure people know about Male Cancers and the more money we raise, the more awareness we raise the better.
The donations that have really struck me though are the little ones, the one that really made me smile and get a really warm fuzzy feeling was from a young chap on ebay who I bought a camping shovel from – when we completed the purchase he looked at our website and decided to donate the profit from the shovel purchase – how cool is that!?
So first off I want to say thank you to everyone that has donated, and secondly I want to point you in the direction of another justgiving page – that of Patrick’s latest adventure – The Longest Day – John O’ Groats to Lands End…non stop and in under 24hours!
When we started this whole thing we did wonder if we should do something ‘worthy’ to try and off-set the blatant fun we were going to have blasting around old Europe and Russia on our bikes. But when it came to choosing what to do the ‘charidee’ thing seemed a little… well, done and ‘old’.
In fact we had quite a long discussion about if we should do it at all. It got quite cynical – would it help us get sponsorship? Would it help us get a foot in the door with people who could help us? Looking back now that seems absolutely dreadful, how could we possibly use a charity to further our aims of getting money out of large companies to pay for our summer holiday!? But those thoughts did cross our minds, in part I think because of the current explosion of Adventure Travel shows on the TV that do exactly that.
But thankfully in the end we got talking to some fantastic people over at Everyman – part of the Institute of Cancer Research – apart from the fact male cancers get very little air-time in the media we felt really strongly that men don’t take enough notice of this kind of thing, it’s something very close to all three of our hearts – for various reasons – and if we can raise even a little cash through this site and this adventure, well, we’ve done something to help out.
Today I’ve been humbled again by another £50 donation through our justgiving page – it always leaves me with my mouth open as I see people parting with their hard earned cash to help out a charity like Everyman.
So to everyone that’s dug deep, to everyone who’s given what they can afford…. Thank you.
It’s been a hell of a couple of weeks, as well as working on Innovation Labs I’m also pulling together everything for Mashed in June – the good news is I’ve managed to secure the dates and venue – it’s going to be held at Alexandra Palace again and it will run over the 20th 21st and 22nd of June.
There’s going to be a conference on the Friday, and then the hack event over the Saturday and Sunday as before… more details being arranged as I type this and I’ll try to keep you all up to date as more details emerge – I’m also going to blog here quite a lot about organising this thing – for me more than anyone else – as last years flew by so quickly I missed a lot of it!
Given we’re now filming in wide-screen and that it would be nice to watch all the review shows in one place we’ve built a new page to allow you to do just that!
It sounds more exciting than it really is, but bookmark this link
http://journeytorussia.co.uk/watch-the-show
or subscribe to the RSS feed at
http://journeytorussia.blip.tv/rss
Shows in the pipeline include a guide to which tents will serve you best on the road, and the first of what I hope will be many cooking themed shows, with recipes that will keep you healthy using local food and the simplest of tools.
If there’s something you’d like to see us film drop us a note 🙂
They’ve let me out of the garage – goodness knows why – but Patrick, Stace and I headed down to the London Business Centre over the weekend and met up with some great people who are there to make planning your trip nice and easy – but in the main we just liked to play with the kit and mess around with the camera!
A new episode in the Review Show… They’ve let me out of the garage – goodness knows why – but Patrick, Stace and I headed down to the London Business Centre over the weekend and met up with some great people who are there to make planning your trip nice and easy – but in the main we just liked to play with the kit and mess around with the camera!
I don’t think I’ll ever forgive the wonderful Sarah Mines for this but there you go.
Here are the rules:
So, trying to gather some pace with this thing here we go:
I was a nurse. Seriously I went to Swansea University and spent eighteen months learning how to look after quite ill people. I really really enjoyed it, and would still be there if my demo to the local radio station hadn’t resulted in a breakfast show. It has made me incredibly un-sympathetic to sick people though.
I was a commercial radio breakfast show presenter. Rather amazingly, off the back of one rather bad demo Bridge FM in South Wales made me their breakfast show presenter for six months before I had a massive falling out with the manager, luckily I already had a job at the BBC by then.
I’m a buddhist. Not random, but new.
I have a problem with tools. I spend any slow Sunday shopping in Machine Mart. I wish there was some kind of rehab.
I like nothing better than the sound of rain on canvass. I’m a big fan of camping and drag my poor suffering wife to damp fields in sub zero temperatures just so I can listen to the dew landing on the tent.
I have two cats, had a dog, but have a secret hankering for a family of goats.
I was a member of the New Labour Society in University, but then got thrown out for supporting an independent candidate in the student district of Swansea. At the count for the election I was punched in the face by a New Labour type who lost the election. I’ve not got involved in politics since then.
I secretly wish I was on the stage. Ever since school I’ve enjoyed acting – to the point where I actually believe I could be on the stage in the West End – I’ve even thought about going to auditions. Reality then kicks in and I discover how much talent you need to do that kind of thing and how far out of my depth I am.
Okay with that over with let’s think…. eight people to nominate.
Euan Semple – fantastic ex-BBC who taught me a lot
Frank Boyd – wonderful chap behind the Innovation Labs.
Tom Coates – totally awesome guy, ex-BBC now Yahoo!
Chad Dickerson – gentleman and a scholar, a true blue and genius to boot.
Robin Hamman – a fellow St Albans resident and blogging guru.
Jemima Kiss – very clever journo at the Guardian
Jag Singh – fellow guest once on blogger tv
Peter Cashmore – never me, never talked, but the surname is so rare and he keeps coming up in my google results.
© 2025 Fr. Matthew Cashmore
Theme by Anders Noren — Up ↑
