Month: October 2007

Play Misty for me*

On By PhotoIn Bikes, Other stuff, Photography, Pretentious nonsense, Road Riding3 Comments
Misty Commute, originally uploaded by Alex Leigh.

From the 21st of September, night displaces day and dark replaces light. Autumn, with all its’ decay and death, symbolises the changing of the guard between bright colours and inky blackness. Chasing light away, as the wounded animal it has become, is the switch flick of GMT plunging this seaswept Atlantic island into perpetual darkness for three long months.

Something to look forward too then, along with the commercial parody of the long debased religious myth that is Christmas, wind, rain, gloom, doom and – to bottom it all – trails below the water table. And yet before the storms lies a windless lull of a two tone world – impenetrable and moist as daybreak pushes feebly westward, and then blue, crisp and really quite agreeable as weakening sun rays burn away the fog.

This makes commuting a bit of a bugger.

4.1 degrees is not motivating weather. But set off we must, uncomfortable in heavier clothes and half blind from refracting light beams dissipating against a nebulous but impenetrable wall. Today a bike piloted by memory and internal gyroscopes is quicker than meandering cars, and their too powerful headlights groping at the darkness. But it doesn’t feel safe; if they can’t see the road, what chance they notice a one foot wide by six foot tall mobile statistic, whose dimming lights emit nothing more than a ghostly halo.

Riding scared, I ran away onto unlit side roads where looming dog walkers – zombified by the fog – lurched in late surprise as the hiss of damp tyres warned of my approach. The fog tamps down sound as well as light and little of each escaped to stimulate the senses. I was reduced to 3/4 speed, straining eyes and ears for pain giving obstacles and cranking peripheral vision to separate the murky green edges from greasy tarmac.

Soft rain sizzled off clothing, sweat beaded under now a too warm jacket and still cold breath merged instantly with the clamping fog bounding my world. But only once did the journey go bad, when frontier stones – guarding a tended lawn – loomed large like dirty ogres teeth ready to chew up this knight in shining lycra. A fast shimmy, as wet grass plucked away traction from slick tyres, and a desperate course change saw us plot a lucky line back onto the blacktop.

I fear there may have been collateral damage in terms of carefully planted perennials. Certainly as the station emerged fromunder fuzzy streetlights, it became apparent that the bike was considerably more shrubbery accesorised that it had been twenty five minutes previously.

But there was a feeling of worthy which is not earned during the summer. A flapjacks’ worth of extra effort, a coffee double-shot of not taking the easy option, a warming winter pint coming back the other way. Still a thousand times better than taking the car.

* I hope Seb doesn’t see this photo. Technically it’s all over the place. Compositionally it would blow a randy goat. In my defense, the camera was on my phone, the temperature was still bloody chilly and the bloke on the platform thought I was stalking him.

Blowout.

On By AlexIn Other stuff7 Comments

Air was involved, tyres or arses were not. A quarterly Asthma checkup and the peak flow meter is the undisputed big gun of lung levelling metrics. There’s a scary graph of past performance with soaring summits of invincibility shadowed by deep valleys of potential bungalow ownership.

2006 average was about 600, the first half of this year down a worrying 20{45ac9c3234d371044e23e276755ef3a4dde8f1068375defba7d385ca3cd4deb2} on that. The units of measurement is irrelevant but the top line number is not. Most of you frisky young souls out there scale unworldly peaks of 800+ assuming you have been playing nicely with your breathing chambers, and are the non dead side of 40. Hence my excuse for panting like a black dog on a hot summers day fifteen seconds into any climb. Other areas of piss poor performance are not directly related much as I pretend they are.

So when the trend is downwards, the fear spikes hard the other way. And that’s why many of my fellow sufferers cheat before the test. Gulping down surreptitious blasts from their blue inhalers, feasting on the marketing buffet of power breathers or hyperventilating in the bogs before the test. One guy just sits in the waiting room chowing down on Snickers bars which are hardly a performance enhancing drug but it seems to make him happy. Or at least, slightly less hand shakingly nervous.

Today with a clear conscience, a snifter of cold and the remains of a hangover, my number came up and that number was 660. The nurse clearly thought I’d been practicing my technique or had undertaken a back street lung transplant, and my surprise wasn’t far behind.

Always looking on the Yorkshire side of good news, it seems I’ll have to ramraid the excuses bank and find some other reasons why I still climb like a three legged stoat with a head wound. Probably a bike thing, maybe I should get another one.

Tired…

On By PhotoIn Other stuff3 Comments

… but happy. Lovely Autumnal weather turned up in the Quantocks, perfectly aligned with buffed singletrack, truckloads of cake, a great photographer/instructor in Seb Rogers and the cheerful yet tireless photogimp(tm) that is Mike Davis of Bike Magic fame.

I’ll write it up properly after I’ve slept a bit and worked a lot but it’ll be worth the wait if only for the best ever post title I’ve dreamed up.

Yes, I know it’s not up against terribly stiff competition.

Hi…

On By AlexIn Other stuff, Site Stuff2 Comments

…atus. Much as I wish to share with you the collective state of embarrassment that followed a mobile phone conversation, a stern word and an extremely drunk person being violently sick, it’ll have to wait because – frankly – I have better things to do. And there’s still just about enough residual pain from a desk based shoulder injury to trigger a pretty standard whine about age, infirmity and the ergonomically disastrous pda thingy.

But a long weekend of riding, photography and beer awaits as the ace MTB photographer Seb Rogers takes me and three others under his wing in an attempt to focus our fledgling (or in my case non existent) soul stealing skills. Metcheck tells me the sun will shine, history tells me I shall probably be using crushing hangovers as excuses for rubbish everything, my wife tells me this is an odd thing to ask for as a 40th birthday present.

Bikes? Photography? Beer? Quantocks Singletrack? No, on reflection, I think it’ll be fine.

Back Monday with some awesome riding shots assuming I can steal Seb’s memory card.

Reverse stalker.

On By AlexIn Site Stuff5 Comments

During a spot of electronic housekeeping, the entire stat-pack from the last year has been deleted archived. This is all part of a complex but well documented back up regime where the whole bloody lot has gone, gone, gone every possible care is taken to ensure that data is not lost. Twenty years in IT and still a bit punchy on the “are you ABSOLUTELY SURE?” dialogue box.

So a million spam bots can again batter their electronic bullet heads against the triple glazed window of my spam filter while I take a brief peek behind the net curtains of the stats page. Twitching as I was, it seems not much has changed, still about five hundred real people a day, still a few hits from some rather large organisations that clearly don’t monitor web access AND a regular web prod from a person who works for a major Formula 1 Company.

Sod the rest of you, I’m talking to him/her. Look, I basically lie for a living so if you need anything fabricating that’d induce some kind of reciprocal come and have a look round the factory, I’m up for it. Honestly, I’m that shallow. Really, like a tea spoon.

Actually building on that, I may soon be in need of a low interest loan, some tyres for the car, a post grad degree, a warehouseful of fish fingers and a pair of novelty socks. You know how you are. And now, worryingly so do I.

Anyway I hit delete again? Why? Because I’m stupid and wondered if it’s true that only an insane man will do the same thing twice to see if he gets the same result.

If MySpace were a country..

On By AlexIn Other stuff, Site Stuff5 Comments

… it’d house 150 million citizens apparently. Dreadful place to live tho – nobody over the age of about 11, a language with all the vocabulary required to span ‘ugh’ to ‘fuck’ and a national costume of grunge, dirt and hair. Difficult to see how it’d get past the first generation since economic success would be based on everyone getting up around 2pm and playing in an unsigned band. Copulation could also be a bit hit and miss, what with everyone looking the same and communicating in base grunt.

If Facebook were a country, 30 Million middle class people would amusingly poke each other every five minutes whilst exclaiming “I am currently wasting my time pretending to be hip“. The country would be a hotbed of dinner parties, photo exchanges and membership of ever more niche clubs such as “one handed, two fingered, three in a bed with a baboon“. Nobody would have to work because they’ve already earned their money and the only market would see useless trinkets traded on eBay.

If Pickled-Hedgehog was a country, 550 lunatics would be running the asylum. Most would cycle, all would drink and victims from FaceBook and MySpace would be imported for merry challenges involving the scorpion pit. We would lie, cheat, exaggerate, self-promote, idolise in vainglory and repent at leisure. Rain would be banned as would tarmac, street performers and any institution professing an interest in democracy. I would, of course, be in charge but there would be sufficient Dukedoms and Titles so that you wouldn’t mind.

We’ve already done policy. I reckon we’ve all earned a decent drink and a nice round of cheese.

Full Wets

On By AlexIn Bikes, Road Riding1 Comment

Did anyone catch the Rookie F1 Brit aquaplaning his low slung rocket at 200 MPH, on slippy tarmac occasionally rising above a deluged skid pan? No? Me Neither, that’s not what this is about. Oh sure, the barely-long-trousered wunderkid has skill, balls and attitude in spades but to hell with him, I’ve been getting wet.

Full Wets means Summer is over and Winter is coming. Out with the Gortex covered shoes, shorts and jacket, power up the big lights, dig out the longs and fix an expression of extreme stoicism on your fizog.

And then get in the car and drive to the station. Still ample time to get jiggy with the moist button in London tho.

With wet comes dark and splashing through Hyde Park last night, I noticed there were no other bikes within spitting rain distance. But that’s because I’d forgotton about the special breed of night rider – the ninja cyclist. Dresses entirely in black atop a black steed and – another scorpion pit offence – wearing dark sunglasses. Only when the whites of his eyes were briefly illuminated did the proximity alarm start mentally dinging like a bastard.

A desperate wrench of the bars was almost enough to avoid impact and absolutely enough to unclip a previously pedalling foot. What follwed was a lung emptying ‘whuuuffff’ as my – until then – silent assasin exited over his bars and the rather louder curse of a man stopping a fast rotating pedal with his ankle.

It took me a while to find the fella. He was reposed in a handy bush, earphones still installed and groping around himself as if searching for a missing limb. But in fact he was fine – if a little stoned or pissed – as demonstrated by a drawled “hey man, that was RUDE’

I have no idea what this means. It is the street language of young people and, frankly, if there going down the Darwinism route of stealth commuting in a city of a million cars, then it’s a dying language. I fetched him out of the schrubbary, spent a comedy thirty seconds attempting to separate black night from black bike and sent him wobbling on his way with a shake of this grizzled yet wise old head.

Which hurt almost as much as my ankle after a phone based injury I may share with you tomorrow. This morning I woke with a club foot and stumped around in a dark bedroom trying not to wake my wife. This is exactly what happened once the difficult combination of a limp and no light navigated me unerringly to a toe stubbing interface with the foot of the bed.

I’m clearly getting old. Only today I was musing whether it was socially acceptable to set off the fire alarm so as to see how short one of the Girl’s skirts are. I was coming down on the affirmative before a realisation that this was unlikely to provoke a favourable reaction during appraisal times next week.

This time I’m taking the chicken