… and possibly any other limb
You have to give the man credit for keeping on trying and crashing again. Either that or he’s bonkers.
I think he’s still alive at the end 🙂
Category: Bikes
Tens of thousands of words and the odd blurred picture of fast moving vegetation rehashing one of two tenuous threads. Spliced together using random punctuation and alcohol.
Look outside – it’s not dark :)
This winter, I have mainly been method acting “Lithuanian Lesbian” when faced with any of the following – Dark, Cold, Wet, Injury or Apathy. Last year, the joy of spring was almost unconfined as after five months of misery, warm light evenings were a welcome reward for slogging through a globally unwarmed season. I was fit, fast and generally miserable whereas this year I’ve ensued the first two and instead spent many dark hours channeling just the latter.
But having given myself a stern talking too, my lethargy is at an end and, assuming that my bikes don’t degrade into swarf or great floods don’t start a run on build-your-own-arks, I shall be making up for lost time, lost fitness and – in the case of mountain biking – lost smiles. It would be fantastic to add lost beers to that list but frankly these past few months have introduced hops and barley as a staple diet. Although properly balanced with chocolate and milkshakes so that’s most of the nutritional bases covered.
So taking Spring at it’s word, I uncoiled from a warm bed this morning to be immediately tested with freezing fog and a light drizzle. And regardless of the clock of lies, my body was sulkily explaining it was really 5:45am. I bypassed an instinctive grab for the car keys and clipped into unfamiliar pedals so annoying my semi sleeping form even more. Instead of the motorised route hard wired into cossetted muscles, I headed out in the opposite direction to a station alternate that offered more trains and – more importantly – a far superior coffee shop.
Three things immediately occured to me me – firstly I didn’t know what time the train went, secondly the current time was hidden under three layers of fuckmeitscold layers and finally the distance was nothing more than a vague memory. Visibility of thirty feet or less hardly helped as cold lungs bitched about the yomping pace demanded by an anxious brain. But the five and a half miles were dispatched in a chilly sixteen minutes, which expanded past twenty as unfamiliar cycle facilities befuddled my sleepy and un-caffeined self.
But time was well on my side and clutching a rather lovely large Latte and pristine newspaper, I strode righteously onto the platform agog at unfamiliar commuters and the odd hated folder. Still they hardly slowed the train down when dispatched onto the line with nothing more than an evil grin and muttered “get a proper bike, you trouser clipped gaylord“. Important to make the right impression I’ve always thought.
The train was lovely – all civilised tables and empty seats. The experience was further enhanced as it failed to stop at stations separated by a short dog walk or the cheery thirty minute halts that pass for an on time service on the Amersham line. Early days though, it’s still Chiltern Railways who have a hidden charter to drive all but the most sanguine passengers to suicide attempts.
So far so good but my childish anticipation of riding home in daylight were scuppered by an impromptu meeting in an off site location serving cool beverages. And the mad dash to catch the seven pm train was compromised attempting to hustle while in receipt of the weighty laptop of doom. Next time I’ll be a little more careful which box I tick when ordering said Windoze brick because the battery alone weighs the same as Croydon and could power said town for about it a week.
And because the railway company has abandoned its’ commitment to green issues, we cyclists now have around 20{45ac9c3234d371044e23e276755ef3a4dde8f1068375defba7d385ca3cd4deb2} less bike racks to save the planet with. So while my train was serenely steaming out of the station, I was running up and down the platform in a frustrated doubletake attempting to find a slot to safely abandon the bike. The satisfaction of finally crafting a coveted wall spot was somewhat mitigated by the next four departures heading off only to my old station.
But finally, I’m heading home in non sardined comfort watching the day turn to night hoping against hope that I remembered to charge my lights.
Sprung
That is what Spring has done although it is as swallows to summer, with warm, breezy days sandwiched between icy blasts and freezing rain. But warming rays have thawed out this less than hardy perennial and hacking over drying trails has replaced hibernation. Hacking coughs have also been a early season feature but I’m not one to make a big thing of it.
This is Steve Watlington Wakins recently harvested from retirement and showing old school style perfectly matching his retro bike and really rather advanced years.
Not quite as old and annoyingly fitter is Nigel who casts off winter sensibility for a bit of buggering about in Swinley Forest.
For me, it’s a case of scratching the crust off old memories of how to ride and what happens afterwards. Having crashed almost as many times as I’ve ridden this year, my downhill style has been likened to nervous lemming that has been damningly blighted with self awareness. You’re not getting me close to that cliff, no way, it looks bloody DANGEROUS.
Uphill, thankfully, nothing much has changed except I’m a little slower, a little more rubbish and a little readier with excuses pertaining to lost fitness, gained weight and some random mumbling around tyre pressures.
After the ride though, it’s the same glorious dichotomy of pain and pleasure. But I think of it as fitness pain and it is simply dulled with a quick beer or a strong brew. And either is very welcome as long as there is cake to follow. With the pain comes proper tiredness – not the kind of boring bone ache from , say, gardening – but smarting pain with an aggressive personality.
So try and run up the stairs and in it steps between your hind brain and leg muscles calling everyone out for an industrial dispute. I find it best to have a little rest until the Synapse Union and Dendrite Management have come to an accommodation. Yesterday, this took quite a few minutes and children rushed past many times, as I lay supine but marooned half way to the landing.
And the ˜Give me something to eat RIGHT NOW or I’m starting on this child’ hunger pangs are back as well. The kind of stomach wrenching non maskable interrupt that has you running “ okay limping quickly “ to the fridge and considering devouring an acre of raw broccoli.
It’s all good.
The dirty dozen of twelve riders seeking sunshine and singletrack are heading off to South Wales over the long Easter weekend. If I can shed about a stone, regain at least partial fitness and not succumb to any further undiagnosable illnesses, all will be well.
Budgetory issues..
… now there was a couplet to strike terror into the heart of any freelance consultant. Fiscally, it didn’t get much worse than that unless the project sponsor was hit by the belated realisation that all your talk of stabilising event horizons or evangilising synergistic operating efficiencies was nothing more that total bollocks wrapped up in bullshit. It only ever got worse when your thin lipped accountant started nervously quoting sarbanes-oxley as you explained you’d bought a small yacht for the purposes of “business development“.
But even at our worst, which I grudgingly accept was on the euphemistic edge of dishonest, we were merely street magicians compared to Gorden “David Copperfied” Brown and his financial slights of hand. Politics rarely infect the hedgehog as it lacks the catharticism of other posts and leaves me wanting to throw the monitor into the local offices of the council. Plus, of course, I know bugger all about it although that is rarely a semantic leash to my random rabbit chasing doggedness.
But the porridge gobbler has gone too far this time. While one hand giveth, the other slaps you lightly about the face, joyfully explaining you’re screwed anyway. While I have absolutely no problem with a taxation system earnestly charting wealth redistribution through a sea of tax increases, I’ll be buggered if anyone is going to tell me that in some way it’s doing me a financial favour.
Personally I may more tax or I may pay a little less. Frankly, I don’t give a shit but I do care that a government that has crusaded as the bastion of public services appears to have spent everything while delivering very little. So while we’re laying off nurses and targets replace common sense, I’ve come up with a new idea. And I’m telling you because there is absolutely no bloody point in pretending that our vote offers some kind of representation.
How can 20,000 people, each driven by their own motives, imbue a power hungry arse to speak for them to an even greater power crazed circle, who themselves gave up listening about the same time the votes stopped being counted. This is not a party politics thing – they’re all as fucking bad as each other, they don’t care about your problem or your opinion but they certainly care about their own.
The US system as least acknowledges this and lets you vote directly for the President who may share some of your ideals such as bombing oil rich countries, or screwing the earth beyond the point of reconciliation. At least you know what you’re getting, rather than some pointless stuffed shirt asking anodyne questions about constituents that he cares only slightly less about that the bloke answering in the dispatch box.
They say the young are disenfranchised by politics. Good on them, maybe they see it for what it is.
Anyway, here’s my idea. In the same way that we receive good karma for sponsoring a goat or a cow in a country we once funded with slaves as the most profitable export, why not abolish some taxes and allow us to sponsor public servants? It’d be like The Sims but for real. I’ll sponsor two nurses in the local hospital and they can write me some reports on how many people didn’t die because someone cared about their welfare. I’d feel good, less people may suffer and it won’t cost the government a penny.
You see where this could go? We wouldn’t have to sponsor those public services that everyone accepts are either a total waste of time or a government revenue generator. Traffic Wardens – you can bugger off home for a start. Free Market economics with a social edge, I think it could be a winner.
I mean come on, we cannot really do any worse.
Morocco – the extras
I never did get round to cataloging the last two days of riding in Morocco. Not that I was doing much riding anyway. So here’s a pictorial story with a few words. I’d stick to the pictures if I were you. Day 3 started with a few kilometers descent on a surface best described as dusty ball bearings. Each corner was a mountain switchback which led to some fairly interesting “ohhhhshit” moments. I buggered my shoulder early on and was soon far behind and whinging.
I’ve no idea what Martyn is doing with that bike in the shot above but he’s clearly enjoying himself. I ended up back in the broom wagon which was a little scarier that riding. You really need a vehicle here that has a short wheelbase and a tight turning circle. It’s disconcerting looking over the edge to a thousand feet of vertical bugger all but after a while you sort of get used to it. If you close your eyes and take strong drugs.
I met the fellas for lunch and deciding riding was going to be more fun/less fatal than the landy, we set off on about 10k of dusty, loose fireroad that ended up being way more fun than it should have been. At this point I gave up again and so did a few of the others being faced with a huge climb. The road – and I’m using the word advisedly here – to our third night stop at a burbur lodge was fairly terrifying and I was glad of various but extensive medicinal products to dull the pain later that evening.
The last day was going to push the difficulty a bit and it started with a rocky, off camber singletrack strewn with huge boulders. Pretty technical all the way down to the village but WAY WAY safer than taking the landy back down that track of the night before. Some super steps near the trail end put paid to my riding for the weekend tho. A little too much vigour and a little too little shoulder recovery rended the arm pretty useless.
After another landy uplift, three from five (Nig had succumbed to some kind of major intestinal failure) set off on a huge traverse across the valley where vehicles cannot go. And sometimes bikes too as Jason tells of an incident when he flung himself off the trail and over a handy cliff. Somehow he only fell about ten feet and damaged himself not at all. If that had been me, they’d have been scraping me off the valley floor with a spatula.
Apparently it was a fantastic ride and one both Nigel and I are looking forward to doing next year when we go back. And we have to go back because it is a wonderful place to ride your bike and equally fantastic in terms of the people, culture and stunning scenery.
The trousers of truth
With the weather turning to the icy side of inclement and an early spring losing the heated battle with a late wintry cold front, it was time to out the Trousers Of Truth.
I’m becoming increasingly fascinated by trousers and their associated paraphernalia. Firstly a wardrobe miscalculation left me pantless, then some oik invaded my trouser storage space. But this is different, these leg warming garments have always been on the breathe in side of snug and with a 2007 history of serial non riding, I expected waistband closure issues. You cannot pass the Truthful Trousers off with water retention issues or big bones “ they are the arbiter of middle aged spread.
Last year, refusing to succumb to the bald fact that riding in the cold and pissing rain has a fun rating similar to ramming pencils up your nose, these troons became the Strides Of Smiles as my pre-season girth disappeared under seventy tough commuting miles a week. That is almost exactly the number I’ve ridden in total since Christmas so no one was more surprised than I when button closure was achieved without having to squeeze every last breath from my body.
Okay there was a bit of a seasonal overhang but nothing that a baggy thermal layer and the yellow jacket of stoutness couldn’t conceal. And it was a good choice because riding home tonight mirrored the sting in the tail of last year. First there was the sleety rain trying to be snow, aided and abetted by a 20mph headwind and once you’ve thrown a couple of frozen roadies into the mix, it was as close to proper riding as you can get on the roads.
The roadies had chosen fashion over form with their silly lycra and transparent sponsor waterproofs rendered laughable in the face of my totally waterproofed form. I stalked them up the Mall, taking a tow and waiting for my lungs to catch up with my ego. They belatedly did half way up the drag through Hyde park and I beasted them both in a leg pumping, bar wrenching pass chowing down on wet snow and planting a cold nose on the stem. This aerodynamic pose of the athletic idiot saw me pile on the power up to Marylebone though thickening snow and apparently blinded drivers.
One less than diffident tap on a wing mirror and an endorphined fuck off you wanker if you think you’re having THAT lane propelled me into the warmth of the station where tubey commuters were inadvertently scattered. They looked on my dripping and steaming form as late Victorians would have cautiously viewed the elephant man.
But I didn’t care because they’ll never get it and I’ll never get tired of it. Summer riding is ace but only because of days like this. I could still be an angry young man if I wasn’t so old and bollixed.
Arm the Pitt!
Great news in the Leigh household today and – if I may be so bold – for the wider world as well. Only a month after the stupid accident, I have successfully washed under my armpit. This simple matter of personal hygiene was a right old faff due to an inability to reach for the sky with the left arm. This meant rooting around in the hairy undergrowth – David Bellamy style – and attempting difficult inverted shower moves to rinse away the soap.
But now, other than a strangled ‘aaargghhh’, the armpit of doom has nowhere to hide. It was all a bit crusty in there but smelt good so I fed it to the kids just to be on the safe side. Although it would definitely have troubled a Geiger counter.
Okay I made some of that up. But not much. Still it makes a nice change to know why people have been avoiding me.
With the current rate of improvement, my shoulder may recover in time for me to sign the last will and testament. People I used to quite like insist on crowing, at great length, on how dry the trails are and the early return of dusty singletrack. In the olden days, I could have sent out my henchmen and had them killed. Society today dictates instead they receive an email with extreme shortness of shrift and a horses head in the post.
Still there’s always someone worse off that you. And from my friend Mike comes the ‘worlds leading meat processing manufacturer‘ to prove it. Jarvis Products is to pigs and cows what Bernard Matthews is to turkeys although with less bird flu. Browse the site to find such horrors as the “BS-1 Brain Sucker” and “LKE-1 Lung gun“. Other highlights include the “bung dropper” and a medieval looking device to make Lobster spaghetti.
I’d love to be a salesman for this company “Yes Bob, the new BS-1 whips out the brains and turns it into Pate at the rate of a hundred a minute. Combined with this months offer of 50{45ac9c3234d371044e23e276755ef3a4dde8f1068375defba7d385ca3cd4deb2} off the bung dropper, you’re looking at some high speed visceral action here“.
No wonder cows look so miserable.
Jon Gets Mad
I’m happy to plead guilty to raging against the misogyny of the average
car driver and his get off the road, you don’t pay any bloody road
tax nonsensical tirade. Normally a single digit response or the
removal of a wing mirror asserts my point of view but Jon (Samuri) has
put together a splendid rant against the motoring classes.
OOoh, I’ve finally decided to write a proper post about cars vs
cyclists. There’s so much anti-cyclist shite being gandered about
by the media and on the internet that I thought I’d do a bit of
research. To wit: your average anti-cyclist car driver (which in my
experience, is pretty much all of them [there you go, I stereotype
drivers, I’m as bad as them]), have a severe problem with
cyclists using *their* roads, seeing them as unsuccesful, dangerous,
aggressive law-breakers who just slow everyone down.Cyclists should pay road tax (whatever the fuck that is), insurance, pass a test, stopjumping red lights and get off the fucking pavement. I’m not sure
which bothers me most to be honest, the quite sad fact that we’re
surrounded by so many idiots who rant away without ever bothering to
think about what they’re saying, or the fact that cyclists are
all grouped together, one cyclists rides like a cock, ergo they all
must be cocks.I’m going to try to address each point in succession. This
argument is clearly as pointless as trying to collect wasps with a
spoon but it’ll make me feel a bit better
Read Jon’s arguments here and then maybe send him a drink or some calming music 🙂
The invisible man
Our kids have already lost that sheen of innocence and gullibility that so characterised their tender years. Back in the good old days, it was simple to convince – especially Random – that her belly button was in fact a third ear for use when soapy hair washing reduced the biologically proven aurals to hissing sea sounds.
But still I try. And lately, pouncing on the cloak of invisibility, a number of theories have espoused the “underbed farting monster”, “the drinking all of dads beer monster” and “the nasty wraith who jumps on the scales and adds twenty pounds to my virtually fat free body“.
It’s a struggle but I feel that messing with your kids heads is a parental responsibility, so it’s kind of incumbent on me to plant expensive therapy seeds now. It’s may be the only chance I get.
Talking of pointless niches, here is another one – I’ve read a million mountain bike reviews with the faintly pretentious baffling on about crucial angles, trail geometry and the ability of six welded pipes to “rail singletrack” or “increase your willy size by at least 50{45ac9c3234d371044e23e276755ef3a4dde8f1068375defba7d385ca3cd4deb2}“. Possibly, I’ve been mixing magazines here but that’s hardly the point at issue. And here is what the issue is; while the mags talk of bottom bracket clearance and spurious head angles, a special interest group wants to know how well does the bloody thing ride one handed.
You can keep your ability to carve narrow singletrack or drop distances normally assocaiated with getting a passport and instead focus on what is important. And if they won’t I will – my new hardtail has wheeled more miles with me acting as the tea pot pilot than it has armed with both hands. And I’m not afraid to say that it’s the “best one handed bike you will ever ride”. I even managed to chuck it down some steps one handed much to the disgust of my wife. She felt this was well outside the parameters of “a gentle family ride”
And she is probably right. We Christened Random’s new 20 incher (oh plllleeease, she’s only six, button it!) which is a little too big for her but she rides round the problem in a way that makes me think the milkman may have been involved in her conception. A similar issue in Morocco left me puffing the puff of the terminally useless and demanding that someone provides me with a working bike RIGHT NOW.
I couldn’t help noticing that our family has the nicest bikes, the best riding kit, the highest scores on the little known bike maintenance anal scale and almost perfectly colour coordinated. I put this down to my obsession that has – through stealth campaigns – upped the ante with clothing, bikes and accessories for the rest of the family.
Let me tell you, we KICKED ASS on the sustrans today. I’ve almost trained the kids to spit on crappy Halfords bikes and shell suits. For all my raving liberalism, there is a level of bike snobbery that can never be tamed.
Bring me a mountain.
There is always a double knot of anxiety and anticipation when packing riding rucksacks and fettling pointlessly, when facing the prospect of riding somewhere a little edgy. This is a useful simile because Morocco is essentially an ancient, extinct volcano circumcised by donkey tracks and watered by mountain snow melt. Global warning here doesn’t mean the loss of a few ski-ing slopes – no with bugger all annual rainfall, the entire south of the country is a couple of warm winters away from sliding back into the desert.
So a Landrover supported trip into the mountains shuttles us high into the foothills on increasingly crumbling roads clinging to ever steepening slopes. And where the Landy cannot go, the semi-nomadic villages and their animals can, creating vast swathes of lonely singletrack hugging the side of the mountains in a series of never ending rocky switchbacks. It is is – by degrees – achingly beautiful, stunningly unspoilt and bloody terrifying.
The villages are cut into the hillside, camouflaged by the sandstone – itself cleaved from anywhere close enough to hand carry it. They appear at first crude and unfinished but that’s just through the prism of the Western eye. Each building blends perfectly with its’ surroundings, ensues form for function and its’ inhabitants lack nothing in terms of fierce pride in their culture easily mixed with genuine hospitality.
Loading the Landy is always a faff and we’re about an hour late striking out beyond the lunacy of the city. But it’s only ninety minutes into the mountains and soon we’re climbing reasonable gradients at unreasonable altitudes, low lying lungs painfully adjusting to the thinner air.
One of the joys of riding a bike off road is you get to learn the extremes of personality unshielded by any veneer of social convention. I know how well each of my friends climb steep slopes, how able and brave they are going the other way, where they are fast and smooth or slow and nervous. How they react when it’s all wet, cold and shit and their bike is ‘just fucking useless‘ and the unashamed joy of when they’re on it and nothing else can ever get close. This is stuff you understand before anyone volunteers a vocation or springs a surprising family in a bleak car park.
Today we were all a bit average. Desperately happy to be out riding our bikes, but a bit clumsy and lacking in any sort of flow. I like to think of this as my ground state. The first downhill confirmed what I really already knew in that my trusty bike was a barely ridable pogo stick and my shoulder was just a smidgen from being totally fucked.
The sight of my friends snaking away in ever increasing distances was one that became irritatingly familiar over the next three days. A combination of being properly averse to falling on the shoulder and said limb not being of any real use other than for resting lightly on the bar. And aching.
Fiddling around with shock pressures and quaffing ibuprofen kept me going most of the day though and what a great day it was. Officially the warm up, it still threw up nasty little climbs, endless off camber singletrack and fast blasts down dusty fireroads. The landy was always somewhere close, carrying all our stuff, lunch and our rather splendid Berber driver going by the name of Najiv.
30 years old, brilliantly competent in the drivers seat, making local salads and shooing away the occasional seller of tat. His English was better than my long forgotten French (Morocco has been independent of the French since around 1954 but along with infinate Arab dialects, it’s still the common language) and through a bit of both he explained he was away from his wife and kids for six months at a time to earn a living.
Jason had the first proper stack, dumping his front wheel in a rocky gorge and pirouetting over the bars at a velocity marked “that’s going to fucking hurt“. But he emerged unscathed leaving me cursing silently on the unfairness of life. Clearly I am just Mr. Mong and I’d better get used to it. My shoulder really had had enough by this time but my ego hadn’t so I grimaced on for the remainder of the day until two late punctures provided the excuse I was looking for to quit.
Somehow a packet of 20 Malboro had been planted on my temple like form so it seemed a shame not to smoke a couple in the warn sunshine leaning on the handy landrover. I’m a cheap date when it comes to finding some inner peace and mountains, bikes and a general lack of responsibility does it every time.
We shuttled 20 clicks up to a Mountain lodge run by a sour faced French dame whose father had clearly been Vichy. She didn’t like us much and dispatched us to a remote bunkhouse warmed only by steaming ride kit and sufficient methane to ratchet up global warming. But there was more beer, more bollocks and a partial lunar eclipse perfectly framed by a total lack of light pollution.
And since we were on the top of the mountain, tomorrow was all downhill apparently.