… Entire country lurches to right? This newly crafted folk couplet struck me as a furious badger attempted to extricate itself from betwixt bin and fence. But with the clock striking twelve and the seals of city hall being relunctantly passed to the floppy haired fop, I felt their must be a link between the extreme vexation of stripey mammal and handing the capital over to a man who appears to have been dressed by his mum.

Whatever. The badger finally freed itself in a squeel of pain and charged off up the garden to take revenge on the lawn, and/or insect/family pet innocently crossing it’s path. So with my inner hippy fully lentiled up, a fine morning brought forth “A week since it hailed… lovely dry trails” as we submerged ourself in the singletrack of Swinley forest.

Submerged being exactly the right word to spear my lentil* with ten minutes of post deluge slop creating the kind of mutinous environment that saw Sea Captain’s walking the plank. The dichotomy of hot sun and axle deep mud was rather disappointing in the same was as waking up with your knob missing could be termed slightly annoying. Rather than huffing off for some therapy cake, we struck out to the lesser known – and considerably driver – trails, and discovered a couple of little crackers.

That cheered me up as did getting my fat ass off this little drop that I’ve been neshing for weeks. It must be all of about 2 feet, maybe 2 and a half if you’ve deployed the penis length adjustment factor. But the whole clipped in/riding off things fills my minds eye with splintered bones and splattered blood.

Still all’s well that ends without a visit to A&E. I shall however be visiting the model shop after a stunningly crash free flight of my RC plane ended when the propeller fell off. At which point, it exhibited all the aerodynamic prowess of a shot duck. It seems my legendary MTB mechanical skills have been passed seamlessly to other hobbies.

Super 😉

* Hurts just to think about it.

Navigation. From where I am standing – which is normally in a featureless forest, pointlessly twizling a map and trying not to panic – it is merely a bunch of letters starting with N. To my friend, ‘Columbus‘ Nige it’s a mandate to explore new trails, submerge oneself into suspicious smelling bogs and occasionally claim a virgin track for the fat tyred collective.

In five hours of riding, we found enough in the Isle of Purbeck to suggest a return trip may unearth further singletrack gems. In the spirit of balance, I should point out we also determined that recently harvest forestry is no place for untracked vehicles, and cheeky footpath entries sometimes hide arse pumelling field crossings.

But the views were fantastic, the sky stayed dry and the riding lacked the technicality to make one fear for continued existence, each time the trail added degrees of verticality to degrees of anxiety. This didn’t stop me having a sky-ground-sky experience ending with man and bike in a spiky embrace. But that’s more a testament to my skill rather than any significant trail obstacles.

Highlights included being blown UP an off camber slope, a mad urban singletrack sliced by blind ninety degree switchbacks, a tea shop with ten varieties of cake and a full day of riding bikes in a single layer of clothing. Laughing at the Trailbreak competitors as they zoomed off in ever decreasing circles had a certain comedic merit as well.

I have a sneaky felling Nige was giving them directions 🙂

Today we went to the Grand Designs show and spent about£400 an hour. We now have a cooker that will fit perfectly in a house we don’t yet own. This is the kind of fiscal insanity which makes my obsessive bicycling buying seem almost well planned.

In front of me, I have a map. Now I’ve always been fascinated by cartography in the same way that grot mags would capture my attention when I was a teenager*. The symmetry holds; I would peer at the pictures, get quite excited without really knowing why, and have absolutely no clue about what the hell would happen next.

Cracking it open shows vertical delights, hidden clefts, unconquerable summits and sun warmed valleys. I’m back to the map, what the hell are you lot thinking? The area 40ks north of Perpignan is known as Le Ganigou which sounds both medical and painful – it was nearly both. 12 routes radiate out from Vernet-les-baines – a rural town where ‘Allo ‘Allo must have been staged – increasing in severity from greens to clean, blues to cruise, reds to roost** and blacks to crack.

As ever, we chose the hardest route intending to dispatch 6000 feet of climbing over 40ks wth nothing more than a pack of sandwiches and an Olympic class hangover. And, again in the long tradition of giving up, a mile later – all of which was pitched nearly to the vertical – we ran away scared.

“Red route then lads eh? Best get ourselves warmed up first eh? We’ll crack that bastard tomorrow? Right?” Yeah, right. The next four hours were spent mostly getting lost, getting sun burned, getting backdraft hangovers***, getting laughed at by the French and pushing. The downhill sections swung between steep, loose and wide and steep, narrow and rocky. At no point did steep ever leave this holy trinity of going downhill fast. And a bit frightened.

Uphill was – as I may have mentioned – pushing, sweating, grunting and lying supine on the saddle waiting for double digit heart rates and single digit vision. Still, the final singletrack back to Vernet was the dusty jewel in this twisted crown. An initial run in was a steep hairpin immediately switching to baby-head rocks which needed speed and balls to surf like a wheeled jetboat.

Just when you were getting all cocky with rocky, the next challenge were alternating, blind and steep, root-strewn hairpins. Bleeding speed in the manner of “don’t make me lock up and bleed“, I faultlessly dispatched them in a new school manner of “spanners: bag of”. The reward for staying upright was a kilometre of insane trail which took hold of your adrenal gland and squeezed it unmercifully for the next three minutes.

Dave has better lines that me, because he is a shitload younger, a sight braver and *curses* noticeably more skilled. He’s also currently dependentless****, so his dust became my track. Hardtails rule here, so fast to change lines, so easy to manual over portentous rocks, so laugh out load carvey in corners. Drop your elbows, swap stiff muscles for leggy suspension, don’t even flick the brakes and have summer riding hammered into your brain by every bump in the trail.

It doesn’t happen often enough but when it does, riding like this is better than almost anything else. There are no limits, there is no fear, nothing is difficult, fast is easy, everything is possible, timeshare skills come on line for 60 seconds and now you can manual, bunnyhop and – even for the briefest moment – hip jump in SPD’s.

We rode it twice more over the next days and never made the black. But we’ll be back, no wiser, probably no more sober but with better excuses. I have so many long memories from this shortest of trips; nailing the steepest trails, drinking beer in out of season rural villages, Simon coming back from the dead on the first day, falling off, pointing and laughing at others doing the same, taking the piss, laughing till it hurt, long days, big nights, great friends.

Our friends Si and Sarah, who have swapped a somewhat hedonistic London lifestyle for rural bliss in a place perfectly sandwiched between the sea and the mountains, are very lucky people indeed.

More so, because we’ve left 😉

* For my younger readers, this was the like the Internet in paper form. Sticky paper, if I remember rightly.

** Forgive me the freeride lingocrap(tm) on the grounds of exceptional alliteration

*** The best way I can think of describing “the second chewing” of food and water.

**** Probably. We’ll leave it there should we Dave?

A brace of mid leg articulators are essential working body parts for a long weekend of dusty riding in the Southest of France. Useful also for getting around once walking becomes stumbling becomes resting, face down, on the sun warmed ground. Alcohol may have been involved, it generally is.

You see there is an grooved narrative causality governing trips away with bicycles and good friends. Firstly a key component of my MTB will explode somewhere betwixt careful packing and despondent rebuilding. Following closely on is a twist in the story that ends up in a glass and then a full on monstering of the liver. And while the two may be only loosely related, I am powerless to resist the grip of the tale.

On the way to a hangover, which rates somewhere high in my top ten “never another drop, not ever, don’t even mention the word” thumping morning afters, we discovered from our recently domiciled host that “France is run by middle age women” and “there is no point trying to charm them, they get that 24/7 from the indigenous population” and “Driving while drunk in rural France is as simple as sticking your head out of the window and feeling the hedge“.

All you need to know in three simple sentences spread over an evening of ever increasing wine fueled stupidity. Which ended in us incautiously cracking open a further bottle back at Si and Sarah’s house before grabbing a bike each for a spot of “Derbying in the Dark“. Less Bruce Springsteen, more loose springs ream as a collection of expensive bicycles were thrown roughly to the floor, occasionally striking a drunken bystander.

Once Si unleashed his BMX (if not his BMX skills), four men who should really know better spent much time giggling, searching for lost bikes in the darkness and attaining verticallity for the single purpose of securing another drink. Did it end well? Two guesses and you’ll not be needing the second one.

The next morning started slowly because the previous evening had finished not too much earlier. Head clutching shades stalked darkened corridors, moving slowly but easily identified by their cries and moans. Stairs were difficult, cutlery a mystery too far and the prospect of attempting to control a motor vehicle nothing more than legally sanctioned murder.

We did eventually go riding which went about as well as you could expect from a quartet of men sweating red wine and chewing back last night’s dinner. Still hell of a night, not such a fantastic morning.

I’ll get round to cataloging our mastery of both bikes and stomachs when I get a minute not earmarked for some serious study of the inside of my eyelids. But I’m fairly sure the world oil crisis may be over considering the volume of the stuff leaking from my (air!) fork over the weekend. I’m in touch with BP regarding some exploratory drilling of this apparently bottomless reserve.

Something is broken. Thankfully not me although Saturday morning, I’d have paid good money for a mercy killing 😉