As part of my volunteering for the Alternatives to Violence Project (AVP) I'm travelling from London to northern Norway and back to co-facilitate a nonviolence workshop and help a local group to establish AVP in the country. If you have nowhere else to be and have no other things to be doing then follow the journey's progress here, each day between 20 June and 1 July.

Win a great, yet small, prize

Predict the number of legs on the London-Trondheim-London journey - door to door and back - and I'll send you 'A Sense of the World' by Jason Roberts - an extraordinary and beautiful book about voyages.
a) Make a small (or big) donation to AVP at www.justgiving.com
b) Leave a message on the blog by clicking on the 'pobbledockets' link beneath any post in the blog.
c) In the comment box write something like 'I have given, honest!' and leave your name and your estimate of legs i.e. the number of individual vehicles (excluding walking) involved in the whole trip from central London to the flat in Trondheim and back again (excluding the week's work in between).

Rules: 1) Jokes like 'You'll only need two legs' etc., even if funny, will result in instant disqualification. 2) The winner is whoever's prediction is closest and, if shared with another, made earliest, so get your pobbledocket in early.

Friday, 1 July 2011

Brussels to London and home

The legs competition is now officially closed. The entries were:

Cecile: 18
Anna: 21
Sunniva: 24
Ilakshi: 25
Freddy: 35
Becky: 78
Jo: 417
Anonymous: 'too many'

With the night train to Cologne, the whizz-train to Brussels, the Eurostar and one tube train home the legs total was a rather leggy 26, including one bike ride, four bus rides, a lift in Omar's car, two tube rides, a ship and 17 trains. No-one guessed 26 but the nearest stab at it was 25, by Ilakshi, who wins a copy of A Sense of the World by Jason Roberts. Sunniva was also very near with 24. Unfortunately Ilakshi can't read because she's only three months old (although she appears to have an early gift of clairvoyancy and an unusually deep familiarity with European public transport systems) but perhaps her mum can keep the book in trust for about 15 years?

Thanks to all who gave pobbledocketeering a go. Next time I'll come up with a competition that my male friends will also like to try. And thank you if you did pop a little in the pocket of AVP - we raised about 200 pounds - enough to pay for two ex-offenders to attend our nonviolence workshops (or enough printer ink for about 4 months, if you want to get things down to the brass-tacks practicalities of running a small community organisation).

And thank you if you have been reading along. It's been a great trip and in the end nothing did go wrong. So I will leave you with a riddle: the first time nothing went wrong, the universe began.

A blank pobbledocket awaits the solution.

To friendly monsters everywhere!

David

Regurgitated by Justplaindavid at 8:15 pm

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