Oh the irony. Guilt driven abstinence crashes against the waves of our wettest month. Add in the darkness, debt, doubt and the enduringbloody misery of January and the exponential fallout rate doesn’t take much explaining. Not so much falling off the wagon as gleefully setting it aflame before exchangingthe horses for hooch.

Last week I was whinging at length on the rubbish conditions in the Malverns. I unreservedly apologise to those loaf shaped hills havingrecalibrated my worldview of shit conditions. Three hours in the Forest of Dean will do that.

The day started well. Because it was in the van where the rain wasn’t. We’d chosen to explore a trail network much talked up by rumour but unridden by us. Bikes built under threatening skies taking somewhat longer than ‘fetching them out of the van‘ really should. Only when multiplying the differential faffing coefficient do such extended timeframes make any sort of sense.

A sense of what was coming drove us into the cafe where we pontificated mightily over bacon and coffee. Eying my fellow riders from the lip of a massive cup, I tentatively suggested we might want to get out there. Just for the look of the the thing.

The thing being a bloody big road climb not entirely suited to the flatulent rubber of the stupid bike*. Still it wasn’t raining and eventually the ridge poked out of a steel grey sky. We headed into the dirt only to find it replaced by a muddy river with sufficient depth to be considered tidal.

Heading downstream, we reacquainted ourselves with mountain biking in our own little ways. Cez seeking out stuff to launch himself off, Haydn sniffing out endless traction from his chubby tyres, Matt sashaying sideways on over-inflated tyres and me crashing into trees.

Having concluded that this sliding about is still bloody fun, we headed off on now unridden trails ‘somewhere over in that valley‘. Via a few silly steep roll-ins and a river crossing as it turned out. Eventually we found ourselves exactly where we needed to be. Just 100 metres too low. Pushed the bikes up something close to vertical which in the mud proved to be unrelentingly comedic.

I knew we’d made it because the rain started in earnest. We rode a couple of fab trails on this steep sided valley without any major off piste excursions. Where there were clearly many more tracks waiting for better conditions – and in my case – some talent compensating suspension.

Non mechanically assisted shuttle back to the top where – as it was apparent the rain had settled in for lunch, dinner and possibly a light supper – we donned rain jackets and picked a steeper trail. When I say ‘we‘, of course I don’t mean me who just followed the brown spray in the hope there was nothing too scary coming.

Couple of bits seemed to suggest braking might be the last thing you remember before waking up with medical professional removing trees from your forehead. Steep tho. Not sure speed was going to be your friend here. Fat tyres are of course allowing the nesh to control their descents at speeds unlikely to introduce blunt force trauma into your afternoon schedule.

The rain first diluted our enthusiasmfor an extension into the next valley and then washed away our commitment to staying in this one for much longer. Just once more to the top this time selecting a depressingly wide track composed ofmud, despair and possibly my will to carry on.

Fat tyres are rubbish in deep mud. You basically turn into a paddle steamer spraying suspicious brown liquid all around while not troubling the five yards in front of you. It wasn’t just a bike issue – we were all off pushing through the churned filth sucking at our shoes.

Final descent was good tho. We all had the measure of the conditions now and sliding two wheels at low speeds can never be anything but brilliant. Even the tarmac home didn’t dull the grins much. Which considering it was undertaken into wind and driving rain must say something about how much fun we’d had.

18km. Not a big day. Bikes back in the van. Riders in the pub. Three of us requesting hateful cold cordials and hot coffees. January is supposed to be cold and frosty. And I don’t just mean those denied a proper drink. What we have is endless moist fronts adding water to already saturated ground.

If this carries on, I’m going to need thatdrink come the start of February. In fact, it might turn into a month long bender 😉

*although that holds true for any trail conditions.

There’s no FinSnow. This was recounted to me by a pal who is flying to the Italian Alps atChristmas for a weeks skiing*. I’m sharing some of her pain, with my inner eleven year old pining for a dump of the white stuff somewhere more local.

Two reasons; firstly the stupidbike(tm) is clearly going to be an impossible to calculate brilliant once frozen rain covers the ground, and secondly asanother month of slogging through Gloucestershire’s finest Flanders Experience is likely to leave me seriously considering indoor hobbies.

Snow isn’t the seasonal norm it was in my youth. Sure that was back in the Cambrian age, but Boxing Day walks often morphed into desperate shovelling rescues of smaller children lost in four foot snowdrifts.

Back in the here and now I saw a man – not obviously searching for all his marbles – cheerfully shopping for seasonal gifts in an ensemble of shorts and a t-shirt. It was time to pushthese childish memories aside and instead spend the kids Christmas money on pointlessbike stuff.

Firstly a tyre not stamped with summer. The Dune turned up with rotating rubber perfectly configured for hardback and dust. Show them some mud and they responded magnificently by storing this frictionless material between sparsely hosted knobs** before sending you on your way into something both stoutly vertical and bone crushing.

I bought a fat rear*** which improved things down the back no end. Traction amusement as my thin tyred riding friends slithered about with absolutely no chance of success, while those of us engaging ‘Fat Drive‘ just made it so. Mostly with a fist pump nobody noticed and occasionally a failure we’re not going to talk about here.

An additional purchase was justified on the grounds that one trail much returned too was marked by a facsimile of my forehead. Three times we’d ridden it, three times I’d crashed on the steeper section- shoulder charging anapex with more crossed up action than a weekend transvestite.

Not today. My additional purchase begat significantly additional purchase on the slimey dirt. Much of which was pebble dashing me as the paddle steamerrotation of four inch tyres mined deep into the Forest mud.

Again I’d responded to the prevailing ground conditions with Internet snake oil.A front mudguard offeringborderline efficacy but with a rather more irritating stand out characteristic. Being lowest-cost-bidder flexy plastic, it genuflected to the front tyre on encountering the smallest bump. I was basically ‘travelling with woodpecker‘ asthe bloody thing beat itself to death at irregular intervals.

The rear was stolen from a time long past and best resembled a too small toupee for a too bald head. It added a bit of weight, significant comedic merit but little in the way of mitigating the dirty protest splattered from shorts to helmet.

Riding when conditions are quite this shitty can be summed up by ‘a bit more grip than expected, quite a lot less than required‘. Even with barely inflated trail crushing tyres, much of the steering was more hydrophobic than biomechanical. Grip’d turn up for about as much time to begin to trust it, before whipping away the tablecloth of traction leaving us feasting on moist earth.

Fun of course especially with unseasonal temperatures.The forecast promised much but delivered only wind blown showers. The trails – of which I’d been bitching about three weeks ago – were epically muddy. I’d like to give my three week youngerself a damn good slap on the grounds of not appreciating how good it actually was.

Five of us out, a total of eight working knees – one of which was mine while the other has succumbed to ‘patellatendonitis. The Physio suggests I leave it at least a week before riding – good advice I cheerfully ignored because – hey – when it’s this damn good why wouldn’t you ride every day?****

I’ve no idea if the StupidBike is any good really. I don’t know how it goes round corners but I fully understand how it slides sideways. It’s a bit of a drag uphill, but amusingly competent the other way onceyour belief of tyre grip has beenrecalibrated.

It’s getting me out. It’s a stalwart to the grumpy individual who makesexcuses not to ride. It’s making my riding pals laugh a lot. Ithas me giggling.

But we’re just fighting the phony war right now. Bring me that bloody snow.

*more accurately drinking ruinously expensive coffee while watching artificial snow melt as quickly as it can be made.

**Oh God where to start. Okay, I was in London last week and it was like that. Except for the sparse bit.

***Insert your own joke here. But be kind. I’m been really busy. Not had time to ride much. Anyway it’s not fat, it’s just big boned. I think of it as my personal eclipse.

****Because you can’t. As you’ve been sectioned under the mental health act.

I look at this picture and what I see if far less important than what I remember. Sure the backlit horizon is coloured a blue missing from ournorthern latitudes. The trail has rocks, dust and not insubstantial exposure. The rider is rocking some mismatched colour scheme most notable for shirt sleeves in December.

You cannot see the big grin. You cannot go back and live in that moment. Solet’s seesome more.

To your left a 3 foot fallinto a culvert. To your right a drop of about 300 feet into a valley where they’d collect your remains with a spatula. Want to know the difference between living and being alive? It’s on this2 foot ribbon of trail which narrowed to less than half that without reducing the exposure. You heart maybeat 3500 times in an hour, but you notice it only for the 5 seconds it’s banging against your ribs.

Elevation is everything. We shuttled 1000 metes from the valley floor before climbing another few hundred metres on dirt tracks to access the one of the best half kilometres of trail I’ve ever ridden, Took me a couple of attempts to ride that line. I’ll not bore you with the details but its pretty much encapsulated in ‘don’t fall right’.Stuff of life right there.

Sometimes it’s hard to take your eyes off the 3-D problems demanding instant solutions, but really you must. Because even in the lower reaches of Sierra Nevada, this is what lies beyond your trail focal point.

Even I can acceptthe view from this bar is even better than a view from a Bar. I loved this trail, steep and nasty at the top bisected with deep washed out gulleys. Be brave here and the bottom section rewards you with a relaxed flow of perfect curves. Drag you eyes from the dust kicked up by your tyres and burn that image into your retinas. Because a 100 days of grey awaits on the other side of a 3 hour plane ride.

Riding on brilliant trails under shadow parabolas cast by endless sun isn’t enough of course. Half the joy of riding mountain bikes is where you are. The other half is who you are with. My good mate David rode lots more than his head told him he could. This is my favourite photo of the whole trip.

Obviously being atedious narcissist, it’s back to being all about me. Although a proper rider would have taken far more wall than that. Quite enough for me though thank you very much.

As with all good things,every day ended with beer. And more beer. And occasionally brandy. To be honest not thatoccasionally.

I felt terribly guilty abandoning my loved ones for the third time in a single year to selfishly ride my mountain bike. But by God I came back a better person. And after 2000 kilometres and 7 months, finally worked how to ride the bigbike properly. Also learned some important stuff about friendship, while beingreminded of theendless joy of being in high places.

You can see more pictures of dust and general tomfoolery hereand if that’s motivated you to try something similar, David and I would recommend getting in touch with (another) Dave athttp://bikingandalucia.com.

Orgiva is a fantastic place to stay, it’s essentially the administrative centre for this side of the mountain. This makes it a non-tourist bustling town full of great bars and restaurants chock-full of lovely people. The riding is immense and endless. The trails are lumpy and bedrock hard at higher altitudes changing to fast and loose lower down.

This is the route back to Orgiva. We are 10 minutes from a cold beer!

Much of it is pretty steep, quite a lot has a degree or more of exposure. Everything is covered in dust. It’s verymuch a mountain biking paradise.

You will be unsurpassed to hear it’s one of my favourite places to ride. The other is the southern Pyrenees. We all be back thereIn 131 days. Until then these digital memories will salve me against the grittiness of winter.

Riding in the endlessly splendid Andalucian region of southern Spain, my life was full of appropriateness. Firstly the fully suspended, modern angled and expensively adorned 160mm travel mountain bike fitted perfectly into the folds of the Sierra Nevada mountains.

Secondly dusty ridingsegued seamlessly into hot tapas and cold beer. Thirdly every photo contained the holy trinity of blue sky, dry rock and stunning views.

God I loved it. Came back last Thursday and not seen the sun since. Hidden by horizon clamping cloud and sideways rain. Half of the North is underwater while the rest of us are grudgingly grateful to be merely sliding about in tyre deep mud.

So when the going gets tough, the not very tough get silly. My good friend Matt is not what corporate bullshitters would call a ‘completer-finisher‘. So it was no surprise to see the stupidbike(tm) proxying the same version I’d abandoned in his garage, before buggering off to sunnier climbs.

This is no problem at all though. I have many other bikes to ride most of which Matt fixes with no complaints and technical explanations I pretend to understand.

However, with everyone needing a laugh, a frenzy of activity saw many cheap and heavy components replaced by nearly new items from my bottomless spares drawer*

Off went the brakes that didn’t work, the transmission that did but at a cost to weight rationot really captured in my Venn diagram of light/blingy/arguably pointless. Having no suspension other than the undamped rebound offered by a brace of tractor tyres, I felt a dropper seatpost represented nothing less than a safety accessory.

Talking of tyres, the supplied ones really aren’t bad. In the dry. In any other conditions their chief attribute appears to be some kind of alchemic reaction transformingmud into a frictionless surface offering all sorts of exciting diversions. Steering not being one of them.

After some dithering, I ‘stuck the knobbly one in the back’. Writing that down has made me both laugh and wonder whether ‘I’ve gone at this from the wrong end‘. At best I’ve created a paddle steamer shifting huge volumes of mud to arse crack. At worse I’ve prioritised traction over steering.

Assuming the lashed together bastard love child of John-Deere and a rubber fetisher makes it to the first downhill. I have only one spare tube apparently fashioned from an elephants condom. If the weather turns for the worse, it offers sufficient flotation properties to rescue me and quite a few friends. When it finally snows, I’m fucking this bike thing off and just taking the tube sledging.

The new tyre really didn’t embrace the tubeless experience at all. Even with Matt’s compressor bullying air into the vast orifice at a 100PSI. It was flappier than – no really not even I can go there** – er a very flappy thing. I had a quick delve into the bearded world of the Fat Tyre Forums and apparently there’s much to prepare involving badgers, illegal substances and a level of stickiness which suggests any such activity should be carried out in a darkened shed well away from the children.

So tomorrow night I intend to be entirely inappropriate. The stupidbike is prepared for its first night mission. In conditions best thought of as ‘Herefordshire’s Famous Flanders Flashback’, I fully expect it to be rubbisheverywhere.There’s that and the joy of beingabandoned far behind the back of the group. I shall navigate by their belly laughs and amusing retorts on the pointlessness of one mans endeavour to testthe maximum amount of foolishness a stupid bicycle can offer.

At least it will now stop. And go without the sound of chainrings being tortured by shifters assembled by the lowest cost bidder. I expect the traction to be outstanding, front end grip less so, but trees are always just that bit softer in winter.

Assuming some kind of survival/not checking in at a mental trauma clinic, the following night whatever remains of me and the stupidbike shallattempt to summit the mighty peaks of the Malvern hills.

At the end of which, this experiment shall be declared a wonderful success and it’s just the other 99.9{45ac9c3234d371044e23e276755ef3a4dde8f1068375defba7d385ca3cd4deb2} of the population who don’t get it. Or there will be a suspicious fire in the shedofdreams.

No point dying wondering eh?

*mostly. Some additional expenditure may have been required. I like to think of this an investment is ‘future and most necessary spares currently stored on another bicycle‘

**some metaphors are best left unwritten. But for full transparency, I’m smirking like a teenager on his first encounter with hedge grumble here.