I am writing this post on an iPhone, which is great for many things but rubbish for blogging and longform typing.

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Sent from my iPhone

After careful consideration, I would like to bestow the following awards:

Best thighs: Thor Hushovd (also, best name).

Best greasy: Schleck, when Contador attacked after sitting on his wheel up the Col du Tourmalet. Pure contempt! Blow-by-blow account here.

Best outfit: Sky

Worst outfit: The King of the Mountains podium girls. WTF?

Best tantrum: Robbie McEwen’s hissy fit – can’t go past bidon hurling as an expression of pure rage.

Most gut-wrenching viewing: Cadel’s post-ride tearfest.

Most tantalising mystery: The daily contents of the musettes.

Most disappointing performance: Me, falling asleep early on Saturday night and missing the final time trial.

During the Tour I rode 735kms in three weeks… not bad for a commuter but a far cry from the 1220 kms I gleefully set out to achieve. Oh well… next year?

Ok, over to you now… what were your Tour high- and low-lights?

The sold out Melbourne Veg Food Guide is fast becoming a completely updated edition – and this time it’s The Australian Veg Food Guide. It’s coming out soon – glimpse a sneak peek here. Watch this space for more info.

Enjoying the Not your typical treehugger series from Uproar.

The Winter Veg Roast is on this Sunday at Grumpy’s Green – $16 for a vegan roast with glass of red. See you there!

But then I thought, hey rather than doing a talk, because I’m scared about talking in front of people, I’ll record myself and then I’ll sit there and I’ll play it, on the tape… and for some reason I thought it was a really good idea. So um, so I tape recorded myself. And I would have done it like heaps of times, you know, to get it right. And then we played it. And I remember everyone was just looking really puzzled and I was so embarrassed because no one could actually understand me…

- Andrea Bell offers a brief synopsis on her progressive childhood speeches in Unheimliche Manoeuvres. This is recorded by Jessie Borrelle on her new and clever sound design blog, Let’s Okay.

I asked Christine Thompson, who with her husband David had raised this herd, whether everybody should be forced to make the connection between animal and carcass. No, she said, because it might put people off eating meat and that was not in their commercial interests.

- From Hoof to Plate: Jay Rayner visits a slaughterhouse and asks, is seeing an animal killed and butchered for the table something all meat-eaters should witness?

LOVE this Stories from the Street project by Melbourne Writers’ Festival. The rest of the program looks good too, as I’m sure you’ve heard. One would have to be living under a rock not to have seen the frenzy about the fact that Joss Whedon is keynoting the festival this year. I will unforuntately missing out on all the MWF fun for the third year in a row. Dangnation!

Another writer that is sending people into a frenzy at the mo is also related to MWF (and the Wheeler) – Brett Easton Ellis. Awesome writers in their own right, Kathy Charles has written on Less Than Zero (my fav!) and Elmo Keep on American Psycho – both short essays worth reading. (I burn with desire to have an author photo as cool as BEE’s! Note to self: next time, more scotch, more smirk, less smile.)

This is the worst! God, what are you doing? It is worse than you can ever, ever imagine. It is so bad. I am trying to imagine that I am anywhere else but here. I try very hard. I am at a rock and roll concert, I am there, the music has taken me there, I’m down in front of the stage where the men are dressed like demonic, flying superheroes, with batwings, and the spitting of fire. There, that was a great show! I am right there, can smell again the engine fuel. And then I am yanked unceremoniously back to the immediate, awful present when the needle (which is puncturing like a sewing machine would, only without thread, and much, much faster, and you are the fabric passing beneath) hits my spine and something shoots along it, insanely quick, and ricochets into my skull, like a drilling I can feel through my body, rattling the table under me. But it was only for a second then gone. And I am here again, in the room, on the table, looking very intently at the wall that I see I am hitting with a fist without realising. I can be nowhere but here in this moment, I am perfectly awake, I am wholly alive. It is terrible, terrible pain. It has been three minutes.

- I cannot mention Elmo Keep without linking to one of the best things I read last year, The Tattoo in Meanjin. Read the essay, then check out the tatt. Swoon!

Really looking forward to State of Design‘s talk, Four Goals for Promoting Urban Cycling. Amazingly, they have one of my favourite bike bloggers of all time on the panel – the dude who runs Copenhagen Cycle Chic. (Man do I love me that website!) Come join me at BMW Edge to ogle Melbourne’s hot cycling community take part in this serious and timely debate about the importance of incorporating bike culture into urban design.

10.00pm:
50ml olive oil – 403
1 oreo – 50.63

10.30pm:
50ml olive oil – 403

12.00am:
3 tablespoons peanut butter – 382.88

- So World Vegan Junk Food Day has been and gone. I did not partake. (I did, however, inhale a whole lotta homebaked calorific goodness at a potluck, which fortuitously fell on the same day.) But the Fat Fueled Vegan did a stellar job and took in 11,340 junky calories across one single day! To put that in perspective, Tour de France riders eat between 6000-9000 calories a day while racing. Veganator outlines how he did it in My journey in calorific surplus. I love how towards the end of the day he is eating straight olive oil. Mate, I salute you.

First, get yourself a whippet.

Taking a whippet for a walk – cute piece in Three Thousand.

One day I will have a whippet and I will take him for a walk.

Image and Solly the whippet both belong to Simon Groth. Toy is model’s own.

The Edinburgh International Book Festival has created a programme of events with the British Council, specially designed for an exclusive group of fifty invited literary experts from around the world, including literature festival directors, literature administrators, journalists, publishers and translators. Over the four days novelists, poets, journalists, critics and translators will provide an exhilarating and engaging series of readings, discussions, conversations and debates.

Speakers will include some of the most influential writers in the UK, including a Booker Prize-winning author, a prize-winning poet, a psychologist, a crime writer, a political novelist, a performance poet and a short story writer. We hope the ideas you form and the stories you hear during the four days can in turn be conveyed in the work you present to your audiences worldwide. In addition to this programme of events, the British Council Book Case will give you the opportunity to meet and network with other literature professionals from the UK and the world.

As those of you who were at the festival might know, Ali from the Edinburgh City of Literature attended the Emerging Writers’ Festival in May, and she was greatly inspired by the festival’s programming and engagement with writers. So it’s a fantastic chance to go and continue that connection between Melbourne and Edinburgh – both Cities of Literature.

This sounds a bit cheesy, but going to Edinburgh in this capacity will help me do something that I love: promote and create opportunities for emerging and independent literary talent! I will be able to learn from one of the world’s great literary events, so I can make the EWF even better in future years.

This is an amazing opportunity for me personally and for the Festival. It was a shock and an honour when the invitation came. The stumbling block is, though, that small independent arts organisations usually don’t have a lot of money to fund these kinds of things! (And nor do poor writers.) I have been generously sponsored by the British Council but there is a shortfall.

The Festival is currently fundraising though, so I am hoping for the best, even though Edinburgh is nightmarishly packed and expensive in August. Also, dear  international readers and local readers with international friends: any offers of accommodation in Edinburgh would be greatly appreciated! I am house trained and, you know, quite nice.

I have committed to blogging every day while I am away, so if it all comes off you can look forward to a barrage of posts about bagpipes, vegan haggis, Brit lit and riding my bike in Ol’ Blighty.

Great viewing: Robbie McEwen has a hissy fit after being knocked from his bike (on stage 3?). Especially love the helmet being hurled from the bus. There was good twitter rage, too.

Shameful update: Have only ridden 300kms to date.

The search continues: who has the best thighs in the peloton? So far there are votes in for Fabian Cancellera and Thor Hushovd. I am still deciding.

So the dating happened downstairs in the performance space, which they tarted up with white table cloths and candles. I wandered down from my office and the queue to get in was out the door! I joined my friends and we steeled ourselves for some serious literary flirtation. I was feeling good because a representative from the Wheeler had popped into my office to wish me luck and tell me my hair looked good. Now that’s service.

After some nervous mingling we found our seats and got started. The room had four tables of twenty-four people each so there were 12 dates in total. Dates went for five minutes. There were three people I already knew on my table – not necessarily a bad thing. I liked my table but others weren’t so happy – one lady at my table felt like everyone was ‘too young’ for her, and a friend of mine at another table felt like the guys at her table were ‘grandpas’.

It was a shame we only got to meet with one  table! When I went to speed dating in London once we met like 30 people in a night. There was mingling time in the middle but the room was full of tables so there wasn’t a lot of space to mingle easily (everyone was either standing next to the wall or jammed in around the bar). And at the end of the event the pack down started immediately – the vibe was definitely ‘ok we’re done… off you go now’. It was a well run event but I think it would work way better in a bar, then people can choose to stay on after the event officially ends if they want.

At the end I had a bit of a meltdown about my score card. There were three boxes and you tick whether you want to see each date again – not at all, platonically, romantically. I was ridiculously weirded out by putting romantic options down but after a stern talking-to from Michael Williams (‘take a chance on romance’, ‘be bold!’, ‘if you feel a little spark then put your heart on the line’, etc), I ticked a few romantic boxes. The Wheeler staff really do go above and beyond…

All up it was a kind of cheesy and fun night. Probably nothing will come of it but it was nice to be in a room full of people talking about books! And Jane Clifton is always worth the effort to see – she did a great job hosting. At the very least, I got some reading recommendations…

Did anyone else go along? How did you find it?

Have been going pretty well with the not drinking over the past few weeks. Abstaining from booze altogether really is the best thing for me at the moment. When I’m not drinking at all I think about drinking less, generally. When I was doing once a week I would often find myself thinking about when and what I would drink in the next week. Removing it altogether is a good idea, at least for now.

But that doesn’t mean there are no cravings. At dinner at my friend’s place on Sunday, I would have liked some red. In the past I would have had a few and got quietly tipsy but this time I abstained. I didn’t enjoy my time any more or less, but I did have a twinge of – oh, that looks nice.

And yesterday everything felt like altogether too much, and my natural response was to think about having a drink. Drinking is a good way to keep things nice and numb – I have been feeling very raw for the past few weeks; probably I haven’t been very good company.

Also: I’ve been working out a LOT – running and bike riding and some other stuff – which is keeping me busy and tired. Plus it’s motivating. I’m currently buzzing from a good morning jog. Everyone kept telling me running would get easier and I didn’t believe them, but then this morning I felt good, I kinda enjoyed it. And if I had of drank last night it would have been much harder – if I went at all.

Tonight I’m off to literary speed dating. I will not be having a glass of wine.

Apparently, the author, James Kaelan has embarked on a “Zero Emission Book Tour,” and his book is so smug that “the covers are made of seed paper that, upon burial, germinate and grow into birch trees”… I haven’t read the book so I don’t know if it’s worth the post-consumer used toilet paper it’s apparently printed on, but it seems to me that the lowest impact approach of all would be just to skip the book tour altogether and stay home.

- Bike Snob NYC is not impressed with a bike author tour, but the Zero Emission Book Project interests me!

London fields collaborative album – fantastic idea, gorgeous execution.

Vegan food in disguise! I think I am in love with Jay Astafovic. Seriously.

Carla has been blogging like a mofo lately and everything looks soooo tasty, but this pineapple upside down cake in particular is calling me. Through Carla I also discovered this Chocolate starter bread from Chocolate & Zucchini… Words. Cannot. Express.

He began near the tip of the blade (not quite on it) and on each return, he would shift the blade right, moving towards the heel. He mentioned that it was most important to hold the knife on the right angle, and that Japanese knives, unlike their Western counterparts, were only really sharpened on one side. So it was important to get the angle right.

- Tim Dunlop on the art of keeping things sharp in Music to sharpen knives by. (Link via Progressive Dinner Party, which is also my favourite Masterchef blog.)

100 Dates has a new contender – Stephanie. Follow @100dates for all the latest updates.

Independent Portland publisher Tin House Books has announced that unsolicited manuscripts must be accompanied “by a Receipt for a Hardcover or Paperback from a Real-Life Bookstore.” The program, called “BUY A BOOK, SAVE A BOOKSTORE!” is, despite the combination of caps and exclamation mark, a stroke of genius. It’s a feel-good way to score points with independent bookstores while at the same time providing an excuse to return unwanted manuscripts. Who says there’s no creative thinking in book publishing these days?

- Right Reading on How to manage the slush. A great idea. I say it over and over and over again: if you want to get published, support the industry you want to publish you. If it’s poetry, buy poetry books. If it’s small press, buy small press journals. Rinse, repeat.

I’m never sure if I love or hate Luxirare, but you can’t deny her blogging is striking. This caught my eye recently: studded jacket.

Le Tour is dominating my twitter feed and my life! Who will win? Who will stack it on the cobblestones? Who has the best thighs? (Pssst. So far I am 148kms into my 1220kms challenge.)

Image by ginnerobot.