Check out details of this trip that an old college friend of mine is organising to Vietnam. Details.

Johnny will be at the newly refurbished Broadfield Pub in Sheffield with signed copies of his book to buy. If you ask him nicely he'll answer questions and might even read a chapter or two.

Note that there was some confusion over the date of this event. It is definitely the 9th February.

I received this email from a friend today and thought I would share it. If you live in or near Sheffield then it will be of interest.

Dear All,

I’m writing to you because either you live here in Sheffield or you have an interest in Sheffield’s cultural wellbeing.

As you may have heard Museums Sheffield (who run Millennium Gallery, Graves Gallery and Weston Park Museum) have been dealt a devastating funding blow this week when they failed to get Renaissance funding from the Arts Council, you can read about it in the Guardian here:

http://www.guardian.co.uk/culture/culture-cuts-blog/2012/jan/24/museums-arts-funding

Not getting this funding means a 30% cut in Museums Sheffield’s annual budget which in turn means redundancies, a reduction of learning activity and none of the high profile collaborations with Tate, V&A and the British Museum which have resulted in a first class exhibition programme over the last few years rather than the sort of stymied municipal displays you can often find in regional museums and galleries.

Clearly it's a major blow to Sheffield if our museums service degenerates in this way and will have a damaging ripple effect on the rest of the cultural scene.

If you feel moved to, it would be great if you could register your displeasure at this decision and persuade the powers that be to think about other means of supporting Museums Sheffield:
http://www.museums-sheffield.org.uk/blog/2012/1/help-us-make-the-case-for-culture-in-sheffield

This amounts to interrogating the Arts Council on their decision:

Email ACE Yorkshire at enquires@artscouncil.org.uk marking it for the attention of the Yorkshire Office.

You can also email Alan Davey the head of the Arts Council chief.executive@artscouncil.org.uk

I’m sure you can compose your own email but salient points might be:
o Museums Sheffield provides an excellent and museums service which will now be compromised – you might want to include your favourite exhibitions of the past few years.
o Museums Sheffield serves a diverse and large audience – ‘Great Art for Everyone’ in the words of the Arts Council.
o A decimated museums service will have a degenerative effect on the wider arts scene in Sheffield.
o Why were York and Leeds chosen over Sheffield when both cities have a stronger tourist economy, more robust arts infrastructure and greater investment from the Arts Council already – surely Sheffield needs this support most.
o ACE’s allocation of Renaissance funding is unbalanced – central England inc. Sheffield, Nottingham, Derby and Leicester all unsuccessful in their bids. London, Oxford and Cambridge all successful – rich cities and services getting richer and poor ones getting poorer.
o Finally a call to reverse the decision/ find other ways of supporting Museums Sheffield.


If you’re a Sheffield resident its also worth contacting your local councillors and MPs imploring for local government to support Museums Sheffield in the absence of Arts Council funding.

You can find contact the relevant contacts here:
https://www.sheffield.gov.uk/your-city-council/mps-and-meps.html
http://councillors.sheffield.gov.uk/index.asp?pgid=215818#end

Salient points might be:

o Museums Sheffield provides an excellent and museums service which will now be compromised – you might want to include your favourite exhibitions of the past few years.
o The people who will suffer from this are Sheffield residents from all areas and backgrounds.
o A decimated museums service will have a degenerative effect on the wider arts scene in Sheffield.
o Despite difficult budgeting decisions it’s time for Sheffield City Council to invest in culture in Sheffield in order to enjoy economic and social returns.
o Finally entreat them to protest at the Arts Councils decision and support Museums Sheffield via local government funding.

Thanks for standing up for Culture in Sheffield!

Please pass the message round friends and colleagues you think would be interested.

Best wishes,
Sarah

--
Louise Hawson
Partner
SustainableBalance
www.sustainablebalance.co.uk

 Sometime towards the end of 2011 I was sat in a pub with some friends and the subject of a decathlon came up. Not the sports store, though I was doing some work for them at the time so it may have stemmed from there. No, an actual decathlon as in an Olympic event. I did a fair bit of athletics as a teenager – high jump mostly. Being 6 foot 5 I was pretty good and broke a few school and county records. Along the way I tried my hand at all the other events, even include a short session at pole vault once. However I never tried them all together. Not being daunted by a little organisation I suggested to those in the pub that we ought to look into the possibility of doing one. The next day I called the Don Valley athletics stadium. They suggested that it may be a better bet to call the English Institute Of Sport who have an indoor stadium with 200m track, hurdles straight and all the field event apparatus to boot. It costs £900 to rent it for a day. A bargain I reckon. So I set about recruiting 29 other likeminded individuals to part with £30 each and take part. The big day was last Saturday. We had the place from 10am until 4pm. 10 events. 30 minutes each with an hour for lunch! There were a few drop outs mainly due to illness and injury, but on the day we ended up with 11 women and 9 men. We split into the two obvious groupings and got on with it. At our disposal were two staff members who organised us and gave us a bit of tuition / coaching on each event. Things started off well. I ran the 100m in 11.2 seconds and won. 11.2 seconds! Blimey. In retrospect I think that we used the wrong lane markings and I perhaps ran a shade under 100m. But running off a bend at speed was really pretty exciting. With each event the practice sessions became shorter and shorter as we tried to conserve energy. The javelin was a bit of a let-down as we were given flimsy foam things that had a tendency to veer off to the side unless you were lucky. The discus was amusing as they gave us metal rimmed proper ones which proceeded to eat up bits of the paintwork as the odd one went wayward. Pole vault was never on the cards so we substituted triple jump (3 runs, 3 jumps and 3 throws, plus the hurdles) which was perhaps the wrong event to have at number 8 as people’s legs were definitely looking a bit wobbly by then. By the time the bell came on the 1500m at the end I’d been lapped by marathon (in a cartoon character costume) record holder Johnny Morgan (no surprise there then), but also lost enough ground to fellow giant Chris Hutchins (of Stanage Summer Challenge partnership) to relinquish my lead and finish an overall very creditable 2nd. We chucked all the numbers into a spreadsheet we’d cobbled together from the net which used IAAF formulae to generate a set of scores. The world record is 9,026. Chris scored 2,387 to my 2,426. The ladies winner was ex British climbing team member Kat Love with 1,923. What an awesome way to spend a day. I ached for 3 days afterwards, but now feel pretty fit compared with this time last week…

The Nick Estcourt Award for 2012 has been awarded to Talung North Pillar (Gavin Pike, James Clapham and Dave Searle). The Award will be £1500 and the Trustees wish them every success with their plans. 2011 saw a record breaking 10 applications which made a big change for the trustees.

Trustee Sir Chris Bonington said: “It was a very difficult decision, but in the end Talung got the vote as it so nearly fits ALL our criteria. It really is a superb line. The team has a good mix of technical ability and experience in the Alps and Alaska but this will be a good first Himalayan trip. This is exactly the sort of expedition that the NEA was set up to support.”

All applications were better prepared and largely on time than in previous years (possibly in response to this Blog posting by award administrator Matt Heason?)

http://www.heason.net/News_&_Blog/Blog/2011/01/13/Tardy_Mountaineers/

Note the closing date for future applications has changed from 31st December to 31st January to bring the award in line with the Mount Everest Foundation and the British Mountaineering Council.

http://www.nickestcourtaward.org/index.htm

For more details please contact Matt Heason on 01433 529 219 or 07966 529 219

The North Face Superlight Sleeping Bag

Kozi Kids Softshell Jacket 

This is genuinely the most comfortable bag I have ever had the pleasure of sleeping in. For all its clever features, more on them in a minute, the most noticeable thing about it is how it feels on your bare skin. I remember once somebody telling me that sleeping bags work better if you are naked, without layers of clothes to stop interfere with your body warming up the air between you and the bag. Not sure if this is true or not. Doesn’t sound like it, but I always sleep au naturel so the feel of the inside of a bag is important. I’ve had bags in the past where the individual stitching on the seams between each compartment is scratchy. Others seem to take an age to warm up (you know – that moment when you strip off and get into the bag at night…). Well this bag does none of that. It’s like getting into a silky bed!

Weighing in at 1445g this is a seriously light bag considering it’s rated down to -31 degrees. Granted, it’s not been cold enough in the UK this winter to really test it out to the extremes, but it’s performed admirably whenever I have used it and I have no qualms about taking it with me if and when the weather finally cools down to a proper winter! So far it lives up to its product description in that the internal construction (trapezoidal) of the compartments has meant that the down is still nicely distributed meaning no cold spots under the bum, or no superheated feet as it all congregates down there. So far none of the feathers have tried to make their escape from the bag. The design of the bag is such that if it is really cold, and you need to maximise heat retention, it’s easy enough. The zips around the head mean you can synch things up really tightly without feeling claustrophobic.

The bag retails at £220. A bargain. An absolute bargain.

More info on the TNF website.

Original Product Spec:

The Superlight is a sleeping bag for all season use stuffed with 650+ Hungarian goose down for mountaineering duty and cold weather backpacking. The trapezoidal baffle construction keeps the down in place thus eliminating cold spots. Boasts body-mapped compression resistant Climashield™ Prism thermal pads for added insulation from the ground where it is most needed. A contoured footbox keeps feet warm and blood circulating whilst eliminating dead airspace. Ergonomic face and neck gaskets keep heat from escaping. The weight savings gained from innovative, thermally efficient construction makes the Superlight a lightweight year ‘round 4-season mummy bag. Comes with a trick ultralight compression stuff sack that is shaped like the bottom of a pack. Who thought a sleeping bag could be so clever?

Feature
Zero-degree, technical down bag for mountaineering duty and cold-weather backpacking. Ergonomic face and neck gaskets keep heat in

When I was a kid I my folks simply dressed me in jeans and a jumper for the most part. If it rained or was windy I put on a basic waterproof, ran around and ended up wet! I remember my first piece of dedicated outdoor kit. It was a blue Javelin fleece. Bobbly on the inside. I see them around from time to time still now, retro museum items I suppose. Things have come a long way. We now spend a good chunk of our money on car seats, beautiful Scandinavian high chairs, and other paraphernalia for our kids, so why not splash out on a bit of proper outdoor kit? Kozi Kids have recognised the need and put together a range of hard wearing, indestructible softshell clothing. My lad has been wearing the jacket for a few months now and like it. It's warm, wind proof and fairly waterproof. So far he has not lost the button-on hood which  is fleece lined, along with the rest of the jacket. It's made in Sweden which seems to be a sign of good quality. It's showing no sign of wear and tear yet. It has two zipped pockets, one on the left breast and one on the right waist. He loves the Velcro tabs on the zips (I'm surprised we haven't lost them yet!) and the fact that he has glow in the dark reflective bits when we are out for a night run. The jackets retail at £49.95 which is probably more than I woudl pay for an average jumper / jacket for him, but given it's quality and the fact that his younger brother will grow into it, I think it's good value. Looks great too which is important as it means he will wear it.

More info on the Kizi Kids website

The new softshell Jackets and Trousers are the ideal waterproof and breathable layer to keep the kids dry and protected from the rain whilst looking incredibly cool. The 3-layer construction of the soft stretchy softshell fabric includes a waterproof membrane, and jackets and pants come complete with visible reflectors, zipped pockets and detachable hoods for safety.

Kids will love the fun range of colours and styles in the Kozi Kidz range and will want to wear the clothes that will keep them warm and dry and keep on playing for as long as they can.

The new softshell Jackets and Trousers are priced at £49.50 and £35.00 respectively and are available nationwide. For stockist information call Kozi Kidz on 01302 746680 or visit www.kozikidz.co.uk.

 As director of ShAFF one of the things I like to promote is the number of trailers that we screen in any given year. Obviously a true premiere is something that has never been screened in public anywhere in the world. It’s fairly common for film festivals to advertise a UK Premiere, or even a European Premiere for a film that’s already played in the States for example. It was always pretty easy to differentiate between such geographical screenings, though we did stop short of Yorkshire Premieres ;-). However, over the last couple of years as Youtube, Vimeo and other video hosting websites have gathered pace it’s become quite commonplace to launch whole films, especially short ones, online before they’ve ever been screened ‘in public’. Let’s face it, any filmmaker trying to pay back a sponsor for backing a film is going to choose to go online and attempt to woo the masses on Twitter and Facebook rather than wait for a film festival somewhere to screen it to a hundred or so people. A good chunk of the films screening at film festivals are now actually online if you go looking for them. It’s something we festival directors are having to face, reminding audiences that there’s nothing to beat a big screen and sound system, a packed audience all oohing and aahhing together, and sharing a pint in the bar afterwards. So, in order to simplify things, where it is indicated on the ShAFF website that a film is a premiere this means that it has not screened at a festival in the UK before.