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.

Too Posh To Push.

On By AlexIn Bikes, Mountain Bike Riding2 Comments

My preparations for dragging my post festivities body pedalling a pre festivities new bike have been somewhat hampered by a medical complaint. It’s properly medical and I’ve certainly been doing all the complaining and quite right too. What one hand giveth, the other snatches away which medically transpires to a bastard snotty cold and the removal of a lung. The cold has taken up residence in my nose, head and, bizarrely, ears. It clearly intends to outstay it’s welcome sometime even past that of my in-laws. The lung has gone the other way, ravaged by winter Asthma and offering all the oxygenating possibilities of a moist paper bag.

I’m wondering what the cycling equivalent of a cesarean section is. Although there may not be an obvious parallel with those ladies who insist on having their vital internal organs rummaged through in a find the baby? game. But I too am too posh to push? and riding uphill? in this state is nothing more than twisted tautology. If I am to be spared, the nice man with the uplift truck will be operating, otherwise I feel I may be measuring myself up for something sturdy and long lasting. In pine.

But I’m going anyway. One because there’s at least a single Alex based anatomical feature that resembles a mule and, two, after a week cooped up with small children and latterly annoying relatives, the option is some extreme body burying patio action.

My role during this season of goodwill to almost nobody has been to remove the kids from the chimney on Christmas Eve while my wife has done everything else. This may seem a rather disproportional split but when you consider our chimney is buried behind a foot of plaster and two expensive kitchen cabinets, the split of resources suddenly becomes fairer.

Still on the upside, I bribed them to clean my bike.

Right dad, which bit do I wire brush?

They didn’t do a great job but at least it gave Carol sufficient time to relocate the remaining strands of her sanity. How’s she survived two small children and one rather larger (lager?) one for the last week is a mystery to me. She seems quite keen for me to bugger off though, which may or may not be unrelated to her studious examination of our life insurance documents.

Christmas Bonus

On By AlexIn Bikes, Mountain Bike Riding3 Comments

In that I managed to go riding before the onset of delirium, tedium and bedlam, as I naughtily consider my relatives. When the foggy stopping distances flipped from imperial to metric, we made haste in a northerly direction to the Freeride Mecca that is Chicksands. A pagentastic Saturday worship delivered a little mud, tacky but limitless grip and but a few other apostles. Our tempting apple was a warm car when compared to a cold outside, partially frozen beneath a steel gray sky.

But there’s only so long one can stare vacantly at a muddy field enlivened only by the pinging of a fast cooling engine before boredom takes hold. Closely followed by instant frostbite as cold metal stings warm flesh. Eventually after the ten commandments of faffing (of which more at some later day) had been completed, a worthy band of five went searching for the last ladder before Christmas.

Soon our Judas had been outed after declaring himself broken. In an attempt to protect a recently healed fracture on his wrist he performed an experimental dismount on the wooden Shore. His wrist survived but the deceleration trauma on his chest and face somewhat compromised the benefits. The rest of us complained of a litany of ailments raging from fear to hangover passing through cold, apathy and asthma. I was replete with the full set and things weren’t really going to plan until a quick suspension service at fettle central improves the bike if not the rider.

Nice Trousers!

Close your eyes and pray

Continue reading “Christmas Bonus” →

Wow. A mountain bike post.

On By AlexIn Bikes, Mountain Bike Riding7 Comments

It’s been a source of some gratification that I’ve seamlessly transplanted my rambling style from mountain bikes to all manner of other nonsense. Bypassing the old adage to write about what you know, instead I’ve written a shit load of drivel about stuff I know nothing about. What’s even more surprising is that you lot keep coming back to read it. I’m not sure if that’s encouraging or just plain scary.

Anyway, with a barn load of bikes and little excuse not to go riding, last weekend provided the perfect early winters day to detox my pie laden body. For reasons of apathy and antipathy, the core of my riding cluster has imploded to just the Bracknell Two?. Both riding proper manly hardtails but ensuing the lentalist nonsense that is singlespeeding to the power or retro. Honestly, the car park was littered with these machines lacking suspension, decent brakes and any form of obvious enjoyment.

It’s like the ancient sixties car population in Cuba except without any vestige of cool. Still I soon found myself cursing their simple, if difficult to pedal transmission, as rain soaked trails dispatched my gears to a dark and muddy place. My friend was suffering almost not as all since he has one of these fancy internal hub gears, and hadn’t spent a couple of hours fixing his bike the previous night. Yet again, in the face of all historical precedent, spanners were twirled with wild abandon in the mythical search for mechanical perfection.

Actual result in the cold, sober morning light was nothing more than a loose connection between shifting and gears. Cogs refused to engage as I desperately thumbed the shifter, and then viciously dropped three gears when I stamped angrily on the pedals. Luckily I was saved from a difficult head first dismount by a stout contact between helmet and handlebar.

Meanwhile, Nige having no trouble with the Cannondale Bastard? (so named because various non standard parts have been carefully angle grinded onto it’s once pristine frame) whooping and swooping through the slippy singletrack with nary a slip of gear of tyre.


Continue reading “Wow. A mountain bike post.” →

Today is the shortest day

On By AlexIn Pretentious nonsense4 Comments

Except it isn’t. The planetary tilt and the elliptical arc of the sun combine to shorten the days from the front, while sluggishly extending the daylight past four o’clock. But the facts are unimportant here, the Winter solstice is the cyclists’ poster child for lighter times ahead and represents the diametrically opposite emotion to the longest day.

But this day of little daylight has heralded the onset of winter which got in on the act a couple of days earlier. Outside of my window, Mandelbrot spirals are iced into spiders webs and a windless sky clamps the country in dense and freezing fog.

According to the Met Office, this is officially a good thing after an Autumn dominated by heavy rainfall and worrying temperatures. Apparently this was the warmest pre-winter season since records began, so in search of statistical satisfaction, I trawled through my own ride diaries for the last two years.

Abridging the raw data shows 2005 as bloody cold” and 2006 as bloody wet“. So we’re either facing a abnormal meteorological spike or the planet’s about to explode. Either way, the results are all around us with normally snow capped alpine peaks barely dusted with the white stuff.

I was proud of our stunningly proportional response to the devastating environment impact of human colonisation on a once unbroken world. Rather than showing one second of humility and searching for something in our life that stays our voracious appetite for destruction, instead we jump on the winged nemesis of polar ice caps and fly to North America where the snow is still falling.

Stewardship of the world for the next generations? I think probably not then. So maybe that’s what the airport closing fog is all about “ the planet has decided to take the matter into it’s own hands. If there is some precise smiting of the environmental disaster that defines many of the leaders of the free world, it could just be onto something.

And another thing…

On By AlexIn Bikes, Road Riding3 Comments

Ranting is about the easiest thing to do at this time of year; to your right a barrel of fish, to your left a shotgun. I did consider an electronic screech at the political correctness of office decorations but obviously The Sun could do it so much better. So instead, two more bad apples in the bag of all things commuting shall be cast out into the virtual compost heap.

Firstly pretend Policemen who, having narrowly failed to scrape in last time, wrongly escaped a righteous bruising. This part time ponces exist in the high-viz netherworld between security guards and traffic wardens. They can be easily spotted by some physical manifestation of the reason that even the hardly fastidious MET refused to employ them. This may be a forty inch waist, a sixty year age or a hundred fat chips on a shoulder.

They swagger around, accessorised by pathetic facsimiles of those bobbies gainfully employed, directing traffic, persecuting cyclists and being laughed at. And they have an image problem which isn’t going anywhere even with a name change. Special Constables became Community Support Police but this doesn’t hide a certain twisted desire to come home from work and put on another tie.

And because catching real criminals is difficult, instead they criminalise those they can catch. Including cyclists who perform acts of terrorism including running red lights, borrowing a bit of pavement to make a gap and answering back. In a year of yellow jacket overload, I’ve yet to see these sanctimonious busybodies do anything useful at all. And don’t give me this shit that they’re unpaid volunteers until you’ve asked yourself why that may be. No real friends and absence of personality ticks all the boxes for a bloke trying to bridge communities doesn’t it?

Citizen arrests and vigilante groups won’t solve the problem either but at least they’re a bit better dressed. More proper police please. And maybe we’ll take them seriously.

Secondly scooters. Specifically scooters not motorbikes and that’s an important distinction. Modern motorcycles are urban missiles piloted by a similar breed to us – living by the staying alive traffic rules. Scooters are normally driven by people in suits who lack the spacial awareness which would otherwise allow them to weave into gaps. Instead they just park up the arse crack of two stationary cars and we’re forced to queue behind them. And apart from that they’re just rubbish aren’t they? Fashionable in Milan, ludicrous in London and out-accelerated by anything with a pulse.

My motivation needs recharging so it’s with a happy grimace that my final 06 commute finished this week. I’ll leave you with a quote from a fellow street-lifer which neatly encapsulates my thoughts for riding through the winter.

When you’re thinking this crap about ‘might as well have another hour in bed’, remember that you’re actually already awake, and you’re not actually going to sleep for the next hour, you’re just going to try for a fumble, get denied, and get lie there watching the clock ticking down to he next ‘getting up’ point. Get up and ride instead?

Naive Nativity

On By AlexIn Other stuff, Pretentious nonsenseLeave a comment

Random and Verbal attend a proper Church Of England School. Proper in that it shuns any of that modern multi-denomination malarkey, instead brainwashing pliable minds and demonising other faiths. Okay, it’s not quite that bad but the annual nativity play is straight down the line Christian dogma with a few hedgehogs (honestly!) thrown in to provide amusement.

The intake is predominantly white and while that feels like a bad thing, there is no way I am getting into an argument about it on here. But in what must have been an inspired piece of casting, the little Muslim fella was cast as a King from the East. He did look a bit confused though when, twenty minutes in, he was surrounded by farm animals, a small baby doll and not even the slightest mention of Muhammad.

The kids are amazingly precocious – all aged between five and seven-“ able to recite dialogue from memory and sing many songs all in cute harmonies. And their accompanying hand actions are a joy to watch, especially when it all goes wrong and Rebecca from class R inadvertently pokes the teacher in the ear.

Random was a Star (literally) this year pirouetting around the stage while marshalling the first year kids. She looked remarkably assured and rather tall which came as a bit of a shock really – I mean are they meant to grow up this fast?

Verbal on the other hand has not inherited her Dad’s “Everyone! Look at ME” persona and so last week’s piano recital was met with much pre-angst and blood draining worry. I was watching through the steepled fingers of the truly terrified because I so wanted her to be ok. Not good you understand, just not stage frozen and traumatised. She gave me a look, that belied her tender seven years, which translated to “Dad, I’m shitting the bed here”

But she was great. Sure she missed some notes and so it was a contemporary take on Twinkle Twinkle Little Star, but it was worth all the naked terror to see how rightly proud she was.

The problem with the school hall = other than the smell which transports you back thirty years and has you wondering if you’d done your homework-“ is the dust and grit that flies about. On both occasions where the kids have been performing, something’s stuck in my eye and caused it to water. Odd that.

Still It’s the Christmas Disco tonight. Which allows for me to smuggle in a couple of cans of lager and check out whether the poor bairns do in fact dance like their dad.

The Office Christmas Party….

On By AlexIn Other stuff, Pretentious nonsense2 Comments

… was this week and I didn’t go. Having never been to the firm’s bash, I’ve no idea if it mimics the social car crash of almost every one I did attend. But I decided not to risk it.

And this is almost entirely due to my ground state of ˜grumpy bastard‘. However it also breaks Al’s Life Rule #1 which, while complex and erudite, can be simply distilled to Life’s to short to drink with arseholes?. It’d be plain wrong to suggest everyone who shares my workplace – especially those who are privy to the scribblings of the hedgehog and to you I extend a wavey hello, nice to know we’re all in this shit together eh?? “ is an irritating nonce with the social panache of a special needs gerbil, but you know how it is.

You don’t? Ok, Christmas parties pay direct homage to their clichéd stereotype, where a largely dysfunctional flange of those battered by a year of sneering, bullshiting and lying are liberally doused with alcohol and flung together in a seething mass of petty rivalry, sweat and imagined slights. Is it any wonder that every sane man would light the blue touch paper before running away at top speed? Slipped of the leash of corporate responsibility and rendered fearless on gassy lager, it’s only a matter of time before a testosteroned swagger across the dance floor ends in a slurred Hey mate, you’re such a useless wanker and annoying little shit. I’ve hated you for ever and at last years party shagged your other half. What do you think of that then eh? Wanna make something of it??.

Insults are screamed; first pushes and then punches are traded. Security are called just before someone slings a drunken arm round the protagonist and offers that most anodyne of beery advice not worf it mate, just not worf it?.

And that’s just the women.

Continue reading “The Office Christmas Party….” →

Leading from the front.

On By AlexIn Bikes, Mountain Bike RidingLeave a comment

I thought a good way to spend a weekend would be to go and ride with a complete bunch of strangers. Clearly giving little thought to how this could affect my wallet, what little self respect remains and possibly a vital internal organ. Here I am:

Flickr Pic of ride

Bristling beard to the fore, hungover limbs and alcohol sweating countenance somewhat further behind. And all those following riders consulting their internal Debrett’s to clarify the appropriate phraseology to elucidate get the fuck out of the way you great ladyboy mincing queen“. This is tricky because we only knew each other through the grooming of Internet forums.

My friend Dave has written the definitive work on forum cliques and there’s nothing to add other than to paraphrase the hoary there’s nowt stranger than people“. On the Internet you have the luxury of time to think before you speak and edit if you change your mind. Real life is a little more shop front and all the better for it; in the transition from virtual to physical, these faceless posters became amusing and, mostly, drunken companions. They were all properly odd though but since some of them live almost in Lancashire, that’s understandable.

I learned a few other things as well. If you ride with 30+ people with mountain bikes in various states of mechanical distress, the statistical probability points to much faffing and fixing. This happened exactly as predicted except with the slight anomaly that it all happened to me. 34 riders sailed though the ride with nary a mechanical whisper of complaint, while my bike exploded in a catastrophic chain reaction of expensive components.

Well sort of – the chain did anyway and rather than share out the breakages, instead it took it on itself to serially snap under the power of my awesome thighs. Okay that’s not quite true either, firstly the chain bent itself in an interesting manner around the chainrings and, subsequently weakened, snapped during the most inopportune moments.

This left me with a chain so short, I was almost reduced to the horror of singlespeeding and a added injury via a bruised testicle impaled on a cruelly sharp stem. My new non virtual friends wheeled tools with a quiet confidence while I slunk away for a much needed bollock rub.

Proof, if further proof were needed, that Mountain Bikers are true athletes was ably demonstrated during a much needed food stop. Half of the mud encrusted riders salivated over to the pie shop where the poor old dear running it was almost overrun in the stampede for life saving pasties. The remainder haughtily dismissed our pie fetish as unworthy of their personal training goals and instead decamped to the chip shop.

I also learnt not to mix Stella with “ well “ anything really. Certainly not White Russians served in full size coffee cups and clearly containing dangerous fluids banned under the Geneva Convention. My education was further enhanced by an alternate view of the humble sleeping bag. This became the staying awake” bag as the bunkhouse dormitories trilled to the whinny of accomplished snorers and rumbled alarmingly, as partially digested energy bars made a noisy exit via the low notes of the bowel trombone.

So all in all, it was fantastic fun although I sincerely hope the next one is in summer. My year round t-shirt attire and hard Northern attitude to weather has been distilled to almost nothing by living in the South for too many years.

It’s almost enough to make you vote Tory.

On By AlexIn Other stuff, Pretentious nonsense3 Comments

Have I taken leave of my senses? Or are the Conservatives handing out suitcases of cash to all impoverished mountain bikers who have recently grown a beard, and can demonstrate double jointed thumbs? Maybe they’re advocating a new transport policy where BMW X5 drivers are all injected with leprosy?

Disappointingly, it’s none of those things, however Tim Love Child? Yeo, representing what the Conservatives amusingly refer to as their liberal, cuddly side, actually made some sense. It’s rare that the S word is associated with the self important, stuffed shirted sound bites that feed off our deluded cravings for democracy, but in this case it’s well earned.

You see, he wants to abolish GMT. Initially I was aghast at yet another historic British institution being abandoned, pensioned off or “ more likely “ sold to the Americans. But no, he’s talking about making the evenings’ lighter at the expense of extending darkness further into the morning. Since we spend far more time awake “ unless you’re a student “ after lunch than before, this is clearly a winner. As a man with something of the night about him?, the prospect of staving off Lygophobia* for a goodly number of planetary rotations gets my vote.

Oh there’ll be some nonsense talked about Scottish farmers having to plant in the dark and children north of Manchester risking almost certain death when walking to school. I refute all these arguments with the simple response that they don’t affect me at all. And tractors now have lights and so do cars, which is precedent since nobody walks to school anymore.

Obviously, it’s never going to happen because it doesn’t fit in with the Government’s stated priorities of invading oil rich countries, introducing a CCTV controlled nanny state and lying.

Actually I’ve changed my mind, I’m not going to vote for any of them “ it just encourages the buggers.

* fear of the dark apparently. I found this and my other interesting phobias here. I discovered I am also suffering from Ombrophobia (fear of being rained on) and probably Xyrophobia (fear of razors) considering my currently hairsuit facial grayness. Now with a hint of ginger “ it’s all I can do to stop kissing myself, so attractive has this made me.

And who could miss the irony of Sesquipedalophobia which is “ wait for it “ a fear of long words.

Five things I love about commuting

On By AlexIn Bikes, Road Riding9 Comments

Love is an emotive noun and a dangerous verb. Unless you live in California, it’s almost impossible to suffix any apparently significant verb with “I‘m lovin it man“. Try that in Halifax and they’d beat you to death with your own self parody and sell you to the kebab van..

I mean “yeah, I railed that berm and pulled a no handed fruit bat reverse into the hip and I’m just lovin it man”. You’re kebab stock and quite right too.

And yet, for the last eighteen months, great swathes of my life have been erased by a twelve hour day of which four of those hours represent actually getting to work. This is clearly bonkers because what kind of mentalist would exchange a sixth of their day traveling to the office ? Well this one because I’d rather bring my kids up in Baghdad than London and even short circuiting the parenting reflex, our great capital is essentially ten million fucktards wrapped in some interesting history.

The clever bit is to treat these four hours as an interesting life slice, ensuing cracking out emails or slumbering in a dribbly manner. There’s more to life and here are my top five reasons for carrying on:

1:Riding my bike
For those with a high boredom threshold who’ve endured a year of this blog, it’ll be eminently clear that I’m a grumpy bugger. Being a card carrying Yorkshireman, this is essentially our regional identify and I’m powerless to resist our Borg-like state of mind. But I bloody love riding my bike. In any weather, with weary legs or a thick head, and always facing sapping headwinds. Oh it’s crap for a minute but great forever doing the only thing I ever applied myself to and maybe, just maybe whisper it in a dark room, something I’m good at.

I love fighting with the traffic, flicking a “V” after an outrages move, zipping down the outside of fifty grand cars locked into a congestion grid. Making bold moves, stretching every muscle and straining every sinew to win a race, make a gap, staying alive. The worst weather system you ever rode through doesn’t even begin to rock like riding a bike.

When I’m too old, too ill, too broken to do it anymore, then I’ll be properly miserable.

2:Not being you
Donning the corporate cloak and checking in your “fuck you” gland at the door is somewhat at odds with my eighteen year old self. At that age we’re all different and yet double that age and only the chemically displaced still believe we’re not all the same. So we search for differentiation and on a bike I find it in spades. I’m the guy with an informal train seat reservation system as sweat evidences my gloriously fast ride to the station. Shorts and a T-Shirt delineate me as a guy who rides his bike every day and, as a careless aside, spends a few hours in the office.

I could be almost anything else; a bike courier, a high alpine trekking guide, a circumnavigating two wheeled hero. I choose this because I’m planning and I’m dreaming but it’s not my life. What can you in your fat suit and tunnel broken communications offer instead of this?

Go check you’re Blackberry for answers. I win.

3:Feeling fit
Not properly fit you understand. The realm of zero body fat, nutritional plans and exercise schedules are for those with almost nothing better to do. It’s with some wry amusement that I enter my fortieth year knowing that however much I ride, it’s not the exiler of life. At no point will the hair regrow from my crown, the thickening of body reduce to barely post-pubescent levels and nervous energy will mainline serial 18 hour days.

But that’s ok, this is enough. A balance between age, beer and exercise has been perfectly attained through bloody minded commuting. One glorious summers’ day, my pace was such that even those on the Auschwitz revival circuit could not best me. Never have I ridden so hard or so fast for so long. Even chasing a falling sun on the way home, sweat and lactic acid became my pace partners and I refused to slack.

Age begets slowness but since I’m only chasing myself, it’ll probably be ok.

4:Racing
Mountain biking is my sport so I’ve tried almost every discipline including racing. Luckily I was rubbish enough never to take it seriously. Almost no one finished behind me unless they’d been accidentally concussed with a pump by a wheezing bloke looking for excuses.

So if you don’t succeed, redefine your criteria for success. And go commuter racing which is just bloody great fun. It’s like Fight Club, you never talk about it, you never acknowledge you are racing, you neither crow in victory or admit defeat. It’s been a while since I’ve been bested although since I have “previous” with Bromptons, Halfords specials, and semi inflated horrors piloted by bicycle clips, my provenance in this area is hardly flawless.

But it is fucking fantastic, picking a victim, cruising up their “six” and then powering past while affecting the carefree actions of a man looking for his cigarette case. I’m not fast, merely furious and have long abandoned aerobic fitness for cheating and death or glory moves. Okay I may be killed and while that appears to have some downsides, the alternative is getting bested by a bloke with 4 PSI in his tyres, so it’s really a small price to pay.

I love racing. Except when I’m not in the mood when it doesn’t count. Just so we understand each other.

5: Displacement theory
Odd one this. Most of the randomness which wastes electrons on this blog is dreamed up while I’m riding to work. My peripheral vision, schooled by eighteen months of not dying, apes the best electronics radar. The route is hard wired and my left brain plays out every possible “stupid manoeuvre” that some lunatic may pull in front of me.

So I’m left with 80 minutes a day to do something else. It frees my mind to freewheel randomly and bind backwater synapses with metrosexual dendrites. The insoluble become porous and a thousand plot lines for six hundred people with nothing better to read than this play out.

Sadly a broken short term memory and lack or writing materials lead to a desperate attempt to lasso fading ideas. Probably a blessing frankly and if you want descriptive prose and correctly conjugated verbs, I can thoroughly recommend the BBC web site.

So bring it on with your hated cars and monsoon like weather. Soak me, squash me and best me in races. Lambast my riding style and devalue our shared community through stupidity. I care not; in simple terms cyclists are right and almost everyone else is wrong – so join me brothers and sisters in our quest for respect and understanding, you have nothing to lube but your chain*.

*Sorry but I’ve been trying to get that line in for bloody ages 😉