Category: Pretentious nonsense

A worrying window into the soul. Take a deep breath before starting any sentence. Sheer restless energy banished the comma and full stop during these outpourings of drivel.

I am an idiot

On By AlexIn Bikes, Mountain Bike Riding, Pretentious nonsenseLeave a comment

No, really I am. Stop your protestations right now. Ah, I see by my waving the electronic ear trumpet in the general direction of the Internet, all I’m hearing are a few bored people muttering strong affirmations.

Idiocy is really nothing more than short cuts crashing into brick walls. I’ve always maintained life is fairly agreeable if you are lazy or stupid, with only simultaneous behaviours becoming problematic. Getting stuff done is actually quite easy for the lazy person; the trick is to sequence start to end whole ignoring those boring and time consuming interim steps.

Such a strategy marks you out as an efficient and busy person who couldn’t possibly be asked to do anything else. Especially if you’ve booked the afternoon for some blue sky thinking*. Only very occasionally does the edifice crumble generally with someone noticing the emperor is playing naked. And at that very point what looked like frenzied competency is laid bare as unstructured idiocy.

Happens to me occasionally. Few examples come immediately to mind; booking a campsite and time off work at the same time but not for the same dates. Commissioning a 4m satellite dish without troubling a structural engineer, and being mildly disturbed when it ripped the top of the building off** Launching blindly into obstacles on fat tyres and receiving fat lips and hospital appointments. That sort of stuff.

After the latest rock-Al interface, a week was barely enough for the elbow to start healing. But experience tells that the mind needs to get back on that horse right now. Otherwise displacement activity fills the riding void; nasty thoughts about how much it would hurt to fall again on that body part, maybe wait another week before getting back out there, stick to the road, trails’ll still be there, etc, et-bloody-c.

So with some trepidation and not a lot of my normal pre-ride enthusiasm, stuff was sorted, bike was given a cursory examination***, – short cuts remember – excuses shelved and clothing donned. Additions were a set of lender elbow pads that made me feel silly and secure in equal amounts. Deletions were anything I’d been wearing the previous week because clearly it was my riding environment rather than my riding ability which had triggered the crash.

In the zone of stupidity now, I took different paths on every level; first a slightly different route choice then stretches in reverse order, bike on trailer not in the truck, light on first then battery, rear shock checked first not forks. I grudgingly accepted the ritual pre-ride cuppa but considered following Jezz’s jokey advice I should run around the car three times to break the hoodoo. Definitely considered it. Idiot I thought. You’d probably think so too.

And it’s nothing to do with being stuck in some groundhog night, stuffed down the same trouser leg of time that ended so badly last time. It is – however – everything to do with finding something else to worry about other than the ‘it shall not be named horror‘ of being too damn scared to ride quickly. Fast is a filter graduated by ability, experience, age and your mates. It means different things to us all, but being less fast and less brave than you were…. now that’s a problem which speaks of slow decay and the end of things.

These are not happy thoughts and they followed me up the first climb. Which I generally put up with as it has a fantastic woody descent that is both fast and furious. It was neither of those things this time around, because Jezz was reigning it in an effort to build my confidence. Damn fine gesture but it didn’t feel good, it just felt slow.

Next climb my phone is ringing and I’m ignoring it. We’re climbing again into the twilight and the horse is waiting for me, steaming and rearing in the middle of the next descent. I’m stupidly nervous, stomach churning and talking myself out of it. Because it’ll still be there next week, I’ll do it then, it’s not a big thing, I’m not going to be somehow diminished by taking a safe course to the side.

Yeah. Right. Lights on, hard to know if to trust night vision or bar mounted lumens. Drop in at 80{45ac9c3234d371044e23e276755ef3a4dde8f1068375defba7d385ca3cd4deb2} of last weeks speed, Christ it’s loose, was it this loose before? Have I got a flat? Oh for fucks sakes just get on with it. Miss an apex and slide close to the trail edge, too slow to ride on instinct, too fast to really be in full control, see rock, give it a pre-huck nod to show I mean business, look away down the trail, anywhere but right in front, relax stiffened muscles and flop over in the manner of wounded seal attempting to make landfall.

Relief floods through muscles – my favourite natural drug second only to adrenaline – and that demon is pretty well exorcised. The rest of the ride was 70{45ac9c3234d371044e23e276755ef3a4dde8f1068375defba7d385ca3cd4deb2} fab and 30{45ac9c3234d371044e23e276755ef3a4dde8f1068375defba7d385ca3cd4deb2} worry about a total lack of flow and smoothness. Last night was about 90/10, and I never got anywhere near the rock. Been there, done that, got the scar.

I’m an idiot though. From almost the second I hit the ground, insidious worry sat front and centre blocking out what is probably more important stuff. And it was a non event, a million times less dramatic than what’d be playing in my minds’ eye. So stupid, pointless and – if I’d followed those logical steps I’m so keen to launch over – I’d have realised that the fear isn’t the rock, it’s being too broken to do what I love doing at a pace and danger that absolutely defines the difference between being alive and merely living.

Riding last night is EXACTLY why slogging through the Winter makes some kind of idiotic sense. Rock hard trails, dust, cheeky routes, nearly crashing, holding it together, maybe not so fast but a little bit smooth, good friends, happy times. The elbow is still sore, but it’ll heal before my head’s entirely unfettered by thoughts of crashing again.

But consider the alternative. If we’re looking for hoary homilies, you really don’t know what you’ve got until it’s taken away. So when the very next person adds their weight to an argument that riding bikes with the definite possibility of hurting yourself is idiotic, I shall offer them some useful advice in return.

Try being an idiot for a while. It rocks.

* which – as slackers everywhere know – means looking out of the window at blue sky and thinking “I wish I was out there”

** It wasn’t my building. It wasn’t even in this country. A fair part of the top floor did end up in a Moscow street tho. It wasn’t entirely my fault. I made sure everyone was more than aware of that.

*** So no surprise that the cleaved gear cable and bent mech weren’t noticed until catastrophic gear selection failure half way up the first hill. At times like this, it’s important to appear humble while others with good skills fix your bike.

Rock, Paper, Scissors.

On By AlexIn Bikes, Mountain Bike Riding, Pretentious nonsense4 Comments

Rock: Mid-Trail, nasty misshapen lump, anchored grimly to a steep and loose descent. Requires avoidance or commitment.

Paper: “Fell off Bike“. Scrawled about four times across two hospitals. Appended with “significant abrasions to right side” and “elbow cut, bone in view”

Scissors: “This might sting a bit” says the child-Doctor in her bedside pre-laceration chat.

Post lurgey comes a desperate need to ride. After a week off, the trails are running super fast, so we’re on a speed mission. First descent dispatched in a blur of hip-jumps and mini doubles. Wheels off the ground, bike whooshing through spring-leaved trees, brain some distance behind.

Big grins, bullets dodged. Climb and climb but going well, eight days of not riding fails to spike the fitness balloon of three months solid effort. Feels good to be back in the hills, day fading, bike lights dancing in the twilight, so dry and so fast, going to be an epic.

“You go first“. Ego stroked, I go as hard as I dare, sketchy, it’s loose and my brain is still not calibrated for the speed, think about rock step, dither, engage fuck it gland, fail to get a line or a decent pop.

Bad stuff happens. Tankslapper briefly caught, thoughts of redemption founder on second rock, abandon bike calling “turtle” as over bar exit has me wrapping limbs to the inside. Cacophony of bike and rider smashing down the trail. Goes on far too long, roll, roll, roll, miss tree, momentum done, pain starts.

“Big one that, you okay” / “Grrr…yes…no..fuck dunno fuckfuckfuck that hurts“. Important stuff works, nothing broken, much scarred. Abrasions run to half a side and most of an elbow. An elbow that has the bone poking out. End of ride then, get up, sit down quickly, feel a bit odd. Babble a bit. Hurt a lot.

Push down steep section then back on bike. So slow, where did the confidence go? Back there in the dirt with some of my skin probably. Road home, can’t quite remember which shifter does what. Did I fall on my head? Might have asked the question more than once.

Driven to Ledbury hospital which is big, clean and open but entirely unpopulated by anyone qualified to stitch me up. No amount of pleading saves me from the ball-ache of Hereford A&E. Refuse further chauffeuring and head homewards with a woozy head full of irritation and angst.

I know the drill. Shower now saves pain later. Sticky Grit has adhesive properties of superglue. Some swearing but it gets done. Double Vodka with a Nurofen chaser. Carol – entirely unflappable as ever – takes over the driving. A&E full of drunks, police and heavily pregnant teenagers smoking endless tabs.

Wait, wait, wait. Bored, bored, bored. Sore as well. Relieved to have swapped bloody and sweaty attire for something cleaner and less gritty. Still small on pleasures, long on fuck all happening when phone alarms me that in five hours I need to leave for London.

Midnight comes, nobody else does for some time. Then it’s us, ten minutes of not much drama, no antibiotics, some brave little soldier action while staring anywhere where the needle isn’t.

Home, wine transfusion, three hours sleep, bastard alarm call, get up very slowly. Driving isn’t any fun. Neither is sitting on a train for three hours typing one handed.

Both infinitely preferable to tube buffeting and eight hours of gentle ridicule and more pain that I’m ever going to show. Someone carelessly knocks my elbow and the world goes fuzzy and soft for a few seconds.

More tube, hide in the corner hoping it’ll be over soon. Fall onto train and fall into bar. Grab a beer and a brace of painkillers. Worst is over. Bored of “aren’t you too old to be falling off bikes?” no point crafting a reply because they won’t understand, and I don’t care. But I’ll take occasional A&E thanks for asking.

Summary? Riding ragged and fast. It’s going to happen. Could’ve been a whole lot worse – arm, rib or collarbone. I’ll back off not because I want to, but because survival instinct will cut the speed. For a while. Let’s not hope too long. Going to be another week before I find out when the stitches come out.

But roadbikes are going to be fine. Ride to work Friday? I should bloody well think so, if I can attire myself in cycling clothing without excessive chaffing. Bikes you see, like the Hotel California – you can check out anytime you like but you can never leave.

Good Times.

On By AlexIn Bikes, Mountain Bike Riding, Photography, Pretentious nonsenseLeave a comment

Scotland 2008 MTB (24 of 99)

Having depressed myself through the simple act of reading the consultation document/done deal sapped out by the FC for the ensuing forest sell off*, I felt some cheering up was in order. And with the fruity grape being back on the weekend agenda, the simple solution would see me muzzily nose down in a fine Merlot. Occasionally rising above sofa level to extract chocolates from the Kids’ secret store.

However, the serial killer attempts on a liver that’s already suffered quite enough over past weekends has put me right off that idea. Weekends are precious enough without a bastard hangover chaser. So instead I harvested a couple of my favourite photos from a roadtrip back in 2008.

Looking backwards tends to focus the minds eye on a hinterland missing much of the grimness experienced in the then. Rain, lots of that. One of the guys seriously, and understandably, out of sorts, a couple of others missing, and the feeling that this was the end of something.

And yet how can any trip including these great moments be anything but a happy memory. First we see a hamming of up by a lying of down for road sign lampooning. At the end of a long climb where Dave and I invented the idea of vertical geography sliding off to “Hills Conventions” under cover of night and vying for the “biggest bastard” award – “Well say what you like about Scarfell, he might be a bit craggy and sold out to the tourists, but check out those shoulders, he’s a freaking monster”**

Scotland 2008 MTB (49 of 99)

Second up was changing a tube high up above the Lakes wondering if there could be any better time for a sit down and look around. I remember the complete sense of peace we felt up there. There is a certain singularity to road trips- you faff, you bullshit, you drink too much beer but when you ride there are no boundaries, no being home for six, no work shit polluting your mind, nothing to deflect a focus form the sheer joy of being free in the mountains.

Scotland 2008 MTB (41 of 99)

Finally is my good friend Andy – a fusion of great antiquity and shortness of form that clearly marked him out as the “Proto Gnome” – launching over a meaty rock step on his£100 hardtail. He then cast around for a loaner full-suss from us normal sized riders to try again only, this time, with a bit more aggression. Much shuffling of feet and desperate excuses grumped him up until I carefully pointed out that “I would lend you the Pace, but really I need it to work afterwards”

I write this and in my head is “we can be heroes if just for one day“. Three images, one ride, many more to come, so many more have passed. I guess the point is that we should celebrate – not lament – the good times, and only look forward to the next much anticipated event.

The slightly more pretentious angle is that going out and doing stuff creates memories that will sustain you in dark times. Because the worst regret of all must be not doing it in the first place.

* An entreaty so brazenly craven to Government policy, it smacked of Turkeys’ voting for Christmas.

** You probably had to be there.

Stabilising the event horizon

On By AlexIn Clic-24, Other stuff, Photography, Pretentious nonsense2 Comments
CLIC24 - 2009 (17 of 26)
Nig attempting to stablise the event horizon

I remember listening aghast as a shiny man sporting a bow-wave haircut declared confidently that, at the end of his two day training course, all sixteen of us would be skilled in the art of horizon stabilising with specific reference to events.

Fifteen poor saps nodded, a few wrote it down, a single grubby digit, somewhat incourteously* raised, interrupted the Smug-Meister mid bullshit. Into the silence I wondered loudly aloud how exactly that might happen to a bunch of shit kicking engineering types of whom at least half had failed the last training session. And that was to correctly identify the right end of a hammer. In one attempt out of three.

The bloke didn’t really give much of an answer which was fine as I’d already stopped listening. And while my somewhat keener colleagues suffered 16 hours of droning nonsense on managing projects such that any explosions and electrical fires were properly planned, I snuggled into a comfortable position, and drifted off to sleep.

At no point were any feeling of guilt foisted upon my person because, even at that tender age, the emperor unclothed was all a bit obvious. The course did end though with a tinge of disappointment when my request for a spirit level – for the levelling of event horizons – was met with a sneer and a throwaway comment that with that kind of attitude I would be lucky to find anyone to employ me. Fair play, bloke was a total cock but he may have been onto something there.

Any road, I cherished the mental nugget that never in my life would the word “event” ever be placed in a more laughable and ridiculous context. And yet here were are barely twenty years on and the grisly triplet of “Al” “CLIC24” and “24 Hour Event” have shattered that particularly fondly held word view.

Bikes, yes. Racing, No. Bristol Bikefest – Rubbish. Clic24-2008 – Rubbish and Painful. Clic24 2009 – Rubbish and Storm wrecked. Mountain Mayhem – Rubbish and Lazy. Welsh Enduro’s – Rubbish and On Fire. HONC – Rubbish and tedious. Rubbish, Rubbish, Rubbish, Not again, not ever, no way, done with it, it’s shit and I hate it, really hate it, hack my own arm with a rusty multitool to make it stop hate it. Never. Ever. Again.

That’s the summary, if you’re desperate to learn more the links keep on giving with whining and excuses. This year I was cunning enough to forget to enter HONC the day entries opened, so finding that there are at least 1500 more stupid people than me. I’m only doing a lap of Mayhem if they install a mid course bar, and any participation in the organised chaos of enduro race series shall pass me happily by while I stand head shaking at the lunacy of riders paying£30 to queue in singletrack.

But CLIC24 is different for many reasons. And most of them are under ten years old but cursed to die before their parents. As a parent, it is absolutely clear to me that nothing will rip your world apart more than one of your kids being terminally ill. Just writing that has me welling up. Clic Sargent take a situation that looks only black and punches it full of light with a range of services from clinical care through to specialist holidays and every conceivable support service in between.

So many times arguments are advanced that all this should be government funded. And that’s the kind of bollocks talked by people who would like to find someone to blame. Because all the charities I’ve raised money for tell the same story; they don’t want targets, politicking or shysters looking for an photo op. And further this stuff really isn’t what the NHS is there to do. This is about creating a community of carers to ease the crushing blow of the stay-awake knowledge that you might be burying your kids.

And because of that, little lives are not measured in duration only in how much fun can be packed into what’s left. Don’t waste time worrying about tomorrow because look what we can do today. Hey if we’ve got an end date, let’s stick a couple of fingers up and hit it with a roller-coaster. And there are achingly fantastic happy endings for lots of the kids where cancer doesn’t foreshorten tragically short lives, but there are many more where those last days/months/years were made something special by the people at CLIC Sargent.

So if you feel you would like to donate, I’m not the only one that would be extremely grateful. Don’t do it because it’ll get my lazy arse out of the tent at 3am. Don’t do it because you may occasionally find my ramblings amusing. Don’t do it only because you’ve got kids yourselves.

Do it because you’ll make a huge difference to blameless kids who meet joy and desperation with smiling faces.

This is the site where you can do that: Virgin giving

Thanks.

* Giving the instructor the bird 30 seconds in. Classy.

Progression

On By AlexIn Bikes, Mountain Bike Riding, Photography, Pretentious nonsense1 Comment

It is said that you should never meet your heroes. And that’s probably right, because a simple human can only be an imperfect reflection of perception. I think the same is true of finding yourself face to face with a younger version of you.

I will quickly concede that such an event is unlikely. And we should be thankful for that, what with the certainty that meeting a doppelgänger face on will inevitably firm up a suspicion that you are a a whinging blowhard.

But the partnership of everything digital and low cost storage shoves a trillion pixels deep into the foetid outreach of your hard drive. Last night – while cataloguing kids videos* – I found that lot amateurishly spliced together up there.

Most are from Chicksands bike park – in an eighteen month period starting mid 2005 – except the bit where I’m terrorising the good citizens of Oxford. First visit to Chicky scared me half shitless just looking at brightly coloured Stormtroopers throwing themselves into bottomless voids apparently of their own violation. Then I tried some of the allegedly easy stuff and the other half of being shit scared kicked in.

North Shore wasn’t for me. Singletrack in the sky the non vertically challenged would say. I would stare at the unholy union of a Scalextric track and a hamster cage in wonder, but could only see pain, humiliation and A&E. I had a go of course, and scored two out of three.

The drops tho – they were easier. Again advice was always at hand “Just ride off the fookers” a tongue-ringed denizen of the dirt articulated while waving in the general direction of a handy abyss. Tried that, found it okay if I disengaged any part of my brain involved with brake levers, progressed onto some bigger ones, got scared again, compensated with a bigger bike and finally took flight off the big fella.

That’s so far behind me now, it seems to have happened to someone else. Paradoxically I have convinced myself that – should the opportunity present itself – there would be absolutely zero issue with lobbing myself back into space. Sure I’d need to get used to flat pedals again, but it’s just riding a bike isn’t it? And I’ve been doing a lot of that.

240 hours in 2010 to be precise. Into which I’ve squeezed 3012 kilometres of pedalling including 80,000 metres of climbing. Commuting accounts for about a third, night riding for about the same and only two of my six bikes feature heavily. Apparently 165, 000 calories have been burned along the way which probably explains why my clothes still fit in the face of a diet made up largely of beer, wine and pringles.

In my gravity phase of 2005, I probably didn’t ride half of that and was entirely un-bothered – walking uphill was the new cross country we used to say. It’s hard to plot any kind of progression in all of this because while today I’m not mad keen to go back to tweak the nose of vertical terror, that’s not to say I never will.

What I have concluded from this navel gazing is this; last year was a fantastic year in terms of frequency, company, fitness and variety. 2005 was genuinely awesome in that I massaged my cowardice through a whole year of going bigger. Clearly an annual recalibration of maximum personal terror then working backwards persists a belief you’re still pushing it a bit.

And I am. Pushing it a bit. Mainly in age and ongoing decrepitude. Left knee, left shoulder, right ankle, asthmatic lungs, short hamstrings, lack of moral fibre, etc tell me only one thing. Not to stop, but to bloody well get on with it while I still can.

Happy New Year to you all. I’ve already go a ride in 🙂

* On New Years Eve. The 2010 version of boring your family with a holiday slideshow. Soon I’ll be drinking sherry and eating vegetables.

Cyclonomics

On By AlexIn Bikes, Pretentious nonsense3 Comments

Etymologically speaking*, we in a select group here; static friction became stiction, a spork is the bastard utensil child of a Spoon and Fork, and if you see a Geep, it’s half sheep/half goat and entirely confused. People with little better to do than show off can be pant-wearingly boring on the subject of portmanteau – my strong advice is if you ever encounter such a beard, make tracks for the tree line.

Cyclonomics is my stab at a meeting point between those who have a non negotiating standpoint of “You Could Buy A Car For That” and the rationally sane who see speculation in all things bicycle as a sound investment. Take Woger for example, a single weekly commute time banded by the lunacy of GMT sees me on the smug side of fiscal responsibility.

And that’s before we factor in one less car/services to the bacon sandwich industry/public transport time banked for chilling out, and a little winter fitness. This is Cyclonomics at work; hard cash saved and soft power spent on being something other than one of a thousand wheeled cages.

This happy thought accompanied me on a freezing journey to the station where the mercury never troubled the zero point. A thought that was somewhat diluted as the cost of my snugness accumulated in a minds eye. First up, the playful dawn half light – promising horizon busting azure later – was pierced by a£150 bar mounted illumination justified for winter riding. Moving on to cold weather gear, we find thermal boots and socks, fluffy bib tights, a super warm and clever technical top under an even more expensive softshell.

Even my now somewhat troubled head is encased in a helmet bought only for road riding. What this adds up to is Cyclonomics might not be quite the slam dunk I first thought. Apply the “cold light of day” weighting and really how many two legged beings really need six bikes? Or a shedfull of kit/clothes/spares that are mostly discards begot from magpie kleptomania.

But spending on bikes is not bounded by disposable income. It is an agony of want versus guilt. Nice things make you ride, but they don’t make a ride. There’s almost no situation where a£50 handlebar is 50{45ac9c3234d371044e23e276755ef3a4dde8f1068375defba7d385ca3cd4deb2} superior to another that looks the same but costs half. Most of us started with two thirds of bugger all, and somehow we ended up here. Twisted justification is a neat way of lying, but I’m not sure anyone is actually being fooled.

And yet somewhere we have started to confuse cost with value. Strip it down and Cyclonomics is nothing more than an excuses buffer. Against apathy making the easy choices; against smacking the snooze button, against fading motivation when rain slashes spitefully at the window. A mental buttress to hang happy thoughts from. Knowing absolutely it might be shit now, but in five minutes it will be epic. Shivering off a late night train and feeling pity, not envy, for those heading into heated cars.

Riding bikes is a privilege. Any bike, any time, with friendships cemented by shared memories or with nothing but the howling wind and your own laughter at the stupidity of it all. A two fingered salute at not being quite like you. An intenseness of experience I cannot get from anything else.

You cannot put a price on that.

* Two words, one tautology. That’s a skill that cannot be learned.

No Crash Zone

On By AlexIn Bikes, Mountain Bike Riding, Pretentious nonsenseLeave a comment

Ski-heads will reverently talk of heli-serviced runs where the phrase “No Fall Zone” is both a barrier to entry and a badge of honour. High above the marked pistes, where snow clings precariously to impossibly steep slopes is close to heaven for adrenalin junkies. Screw up here and you’ll most likely die – either by tumbling a thousand metres down the mountain or being lost in an unmarked crevasse.

I’d like to introduce the concept of “No Crash Zones” for mountain bikes. And I feel more than qualified to do so with a distinguished history of ejecting stage everywhere, sometimes comedically slowly, frequently largely unnoticed, occasionally with an élan made for video, and rather too often finishing in hospital.

But there is more than a nuance between crashing somewhere good, and crashing somewhere really very bad indeed. Deep in a dark and dank forest encased in coffin sided slate is definitely one of those places. The Climach trail is roughly carved through a quarried out valley and appears to have been gloriously overlooked by the health and safety crowd, so prevalent in other trail centres.

Well the bit we rode anyway, having shown enthusiastic indifference to the delights of the XC loop. The final descent hangs on the valley edge, a perfect singletrack bench cut between slate walls and menacing trees. It’s not welcoming, it doesn’t have happy little signs, it fails to box-tick the “trail centre downhill playbook“, it doesn’t think you’re hard enough to have a go, and it will spit mud in your eye before genially trying to kill you.

Not because it is technically more demanding that anything else we had already ridden in a weekend ratcheting the adrenalin barometer between fun and fear. No, because it’s so damn fast, dispensing with the velocity inhibiting swoopy sinew of perfect apex’s – this trail is straight down, hairpin, plummet again. Hewn out of the slate, the surface is always wet and glassily frictionless, jagged edged to catch a tyre, cambering off to a dark mass of uninviting trees.

Blair Witch for bikes. You have to love it, if only for the sheer chutzpah of a designer who gone with the “fuck it, make it fast and dangerous, they’ve read the sign at the start, they know the risks” brief. One section lingers long in the memory – post hairpin a wall of slate vertically limits the right, dense trees clinging to a forty five degree slope the other way – bracketing a thin ribbon of slate, stone, dirt and mud.

Stray left and you’ll hit something bark related on the way to a 200 foot drop, catch a bar on the rock wall and the experience will be akin to diving head first into a bacon slicer at about 25 MPH. That slate isn’t smooth but cruelly serrated and so very, very close. You don’t want to crash here, you don’t even want to think about it.

I was thinking about it as we winched up for another go. First though I had to fall off the tiny section of North Shore plankage. A standard approach of not getting off on damp wood spanning grim looking ditches* was, er, ditched as I lined up confidently for a fuss-free traversal. A certain causal narrative follows; I look at the plank, I look at the ditch, I ride onto the plank, I ride into the ditch.

Musting** myself off, the trail was now mine alone with my fast riding pals already some way distant. That’s pretty much the situation whenever I’m riding with these two, and it was entirely their fault that my riding speed was way above my pay grade at this point. They need to be slower, or I need to be less competitive.

Corners may not feature much on this trail, but the trail pixies added much lumpiness and scary rock to ensure that you can spend much time in the air and most of that properly frightened. It’s a bit car-crash tv tho – you know one mistake and food shall be served in a drip, but it’s such a bloody rush that the pretence all is fine and you’re more than handling it is a salve for the delusional mind.

Round the hairpin, set up for the bacon slicer, virtual blinkers on, can’t look left, don’t look right, look over there where it’s less scary. Speed builds, split second decision to sacrifice grip, but you’re dare not brake, dare not breathe really, it’ is only fifteen seconds but you’re properly alive, absolutely focussed, living in the moment where fear and joy are just about the same. And then one second – a second I shall relive mostly waking up screaming in a cold sweat – I felt my glove graze the rock.

Two futures open up; one sees the an impacted bar launch the rider hard into the rock before bouncing him – broken – down a cliff offering all the cushioning of hard pine trunks and stumps. The other releases the pressure on that right hand, shoots the bike out of the danger zone and makes damn sure the God of Fate is properly respected from here on in.

I got lucky. In more ways that one. I got to ride mountain bikes on proper mountains with good friends, take more risks that I should, drink more beer than I can handle, and still come back with my shield rather than on it.

A month ago similar things were going on in the Pyrenees. Different mountains, different friends, same feeling of utter peace at the end of it.

That’s not lucky, that’s blessed.

* Because I’ve already got off some 10 feet before.

** A lexical fusion of “Mud” and “Dust”. A winner I think you’ll agree

Just lie there..

On By AlexIn Other stuff, Pretentious nonsense2 Comments

… and tell me about your mother. Freud* was an odd bugger, of that there is no doubt, but less well known is the awesome nuttiness of his contemporary Carl Jung who – after a somewhat public falling out with his fellow couch-man – embarked on a project to categorise each and every one of us into a personality bucket. All of which he apparently achieved without assuming a default position of an Oedipus complex.

At which point, everyone who was anyone** ignored his dry and dusty research, instead flocking to the Freudmesiter and blaming their parents for everything. Frankly, that man has much to answer for based on the feedback I get from my own kids. Anyway, post war and with a bunch of people needing jobs that didn’t involve killing people, the US government funded a Mother/Daughter combination to resurrect Jung’s theories to be applied to the modern workplace.

Myers and Briggs have stalked vocational spaces ever since with their carefully cloistered sixteen boxes of people types explaining why some of us – when presented with an audience – feel the irrepressible urge to moon while others are found hiding in cupboards. As part of a “group grope” management bonding thing, one of the many delights included completing a questionnaire which, carefully analysed, would inform exactly what kind of nutter you are.

Not being terrible self aware, but having been repeatedly – and tediously – harranged for being too impulsive/too noisy/too direct/too just bloody annoying, it wasn’t exactly a cosmic shock to find what passes as my personality is essentially keen to party, especially if it’s a party where the centre of attention is forever me. What did somewhat prick my balloon of carefully crafted amusement and cynicism was the probable reason for my obsession with lists.

I don’t do lists; I love lists, love them in the way of the incurably OCD. Mere collections of tasks are nowhere near enough; firstly we weave in sub-lists, create lists of lists, assign priority stars, stab linkages, arrows and – I am quite proud of this -mark the first item in BLOCK CAPITALS “Complete To-Do List”. When you’ve written “Find Dog” on a notepad, while said dog is probably playing with the traffic, it is absolutely clear that organisation and structure are mainstays of your life.

Except they’re not. My aspiration goals may be neatly documented but they are never completed. Frustration lies between those two points, especially if you have the ability to understand what needs to be done, but are far too lazy to actually do it. Yet I cannot sit down with a beer and a book in the garden, if the supporting chair has a weed in my slumped eye-line. The reluctant conclusion from all this is that my basic slackness is infected with a work ethic itself inkly verbalised in lists.

Because if I every finish this list, and that list, and the list I wrote at 2am while wide awake trying to order chaos, then I will be free to finally sit down, do fuck all and not feel guilty about it. Waste time without obsessing that it IS a waste of time, stop making changes because they represent a new start, give up on it trying for perfect and accept that good enough generally is. What I may have learned is that list is never going to be done, so I may as well try being a normal person to see how that feels.

Carol’s pretty normal – with the exception she had a rather large blind spot in terms of suitable husbands – and I was pretty damn sure her personality was pegged by my five minute skim of some fifty years of research. And I was mostly right, except for the tiny assumption that she loved planning, lists – natch – being organised and helping organise, sorting stuff out and getting things done right now. It appears I was 100{45ac9c3234d371044e23e276755ef3a4dde8f1068375defba7d385ca3cd4deb2} wrong there, which may explain some issues of domestic disharmony in the last fifteen years.

Slow learner, that’s me. There is no point profiling the kids as they are perfectly attuned to any personality trait most effective in annoying their parents. And don’t think by changing the rules that this will in any way wrong foot them, because they adapt way quicker than us old fuckers. And the dog is essentially mad so he’s not getting done unless there’s some hidden category involving a mental type entirely predicated on stealing food, chasing the cat, and – in a perfect world – combining the two.

You cannot read too much into this shit, because we’re all different, yes? We don’t fit into virtual boxes dreamt up by people who apply statistical rigour to something so organically random it cannot be so simply categorised. But for all of that, it doesn’t stop it being mildly interesting if only to make you question just why mainlining the arsehole motherlode comes so naturally. So this weekend I shall organise nothing, my listing notebook shall remain unopened, I’ll let the spontaneous genie back out of the bottle and refuse to accept life will end if that door isn’t painted.

Beer for breakfast then.
* Sigmund. Not Clement although of the two, I felt old Clemmie was slightly more bonkers at the end

** Although by this time they’d been convinced they were somebody else. Probably a Pharaoh, unlikely to be a turn-of-the-domini street sweeper. I wonder what that is?

Uncommon sense

On By AlexIn Pretentious nonsense10 Comments

I’ve been accused of many things. Some – if not most – manifesting to the big difference between ‘waving my arms shouting big ideas’ and the actual delivery of these crowd pleasing promises. But yesterday I was blind sided by something tangential with a heartfelt “You have No Common Sense whatsoever“* being dropped into a pit of quite ego-stroking flattery.

What struck me most was the assertion that us Right-Brained “Look out of the Window and make something up” types can not – and should not – belittle our cerebral creativeness with the desultory drudgery of everyday tasks such as remembering how door handles work.

This bothered me a little because I’ve always craved the heavy competence that comes with practicality, but when God was handing out those kind of skills, I was accidentally setting fire to an Angel. So let’s examine the weighty term “Common Sense” shall we as, from my analysis, it is neither very common nor entirely bedded in sense.

First definition is all about practicality especially in the face of a crisis. Take, for example, when our state of the art heating system morphed to state of the ark when pissing mains pressure hot water down the sitting room wall. I was your shrieking Joe Pesci to Carol’s unflappable Danny Glover but afterwards I was the voice of calm whilst the remainder of the family refused to accept that one crap joint does not put canoe building at the top of your agenda for “Things to do at 1am in the morning”

So if it’s not all doing the right thing when everyone else is considering the benefits of personal explosion, maybe the focus should shift to an all round excellence in the shed. Common Sense is merely outstanding tool usage and the genetic ability to bevel. I’ve met people like this who can turn their hand to absolutely anything; wood into furniture, metal into cars, electronics into weapons and these people all have a name. It’s engineer and frankly they shouldn’t be allowed outside without a minder and a a translater.

Flip side is the practical types who can explain – to the point of eye-forking tedium – how stuff works, but let them within three metres of a power tool and there’s a good chance the world will end. And not in a good way. So I’m no closer to what ‘Common Sense’ may be unless it’s something a little less aspirational. Are we talking about choosing to mitigate risk when considering reward? Is it saying “no” when “yes” might be quite a lot more fun? Especially if whipped cream and one of the Mynogue’s may be involved.

I hope so. Because – at 42 – I’m pretty well set on not dying wondering. Most of my biggest mistakes** resulted from an impulsiveness that treasures a quick hit over a long term benefit. A cheap laugh rather than sparing a feeling. 30 seconds of stupidity instead of choosing a line better suited to my skills. A “Fuck it, that’ll go” rather than a week in Hospital. Twenty seconds of bullshit over 20 hours of research. Maybe Common Sense is nothing more than understanding you can be stupid or lazy, but not both.

You see I’m starting to find Common sense, well, a little dull. Let’s look at another human attribute shall we? For example being Brave, which I’ve always associated with a lack of imagination and a DNA lacking the mortality gene. But you will never feel more alive than when wrapping cowardice in a bravery straitjacket and trusting life to something other than stuff that you know is unlikely to kill you.

Common Sense starts to feel like being old. A good mate of mine was 40 years old at the age of sixteen. He’s not changed much in twenty five years except for a big house and even larger wine cellar. He is the personification of common sense; not dull, not boring just happy with his lot and plug-wiringly competent. He cannot understand, never mind answer, my question “Is this it then? Is this as good as it gets, is this ENOUGH?”

Stop being a dick Al he tells me. You’re not an astronaut and you never will me, but you’re luckier than most people. Get a grip, don’t shoot for the moon, disappointment is omnipresent. It’s out there waiting for you to fuck up. Stop wondering about what could be, and enjoy what you have. Now that sounds to me like common sense.

I’ll give it a miss thanks. While I can scare myself shitless on my bike, chuck toy gliders over landscape that feel like CGI, convince my kids that at least one of them is related to an elephant and make people laugh at me or with me, I’m not very interested in conformity, acceptance or death by a thousand cuts.

I am thinking of this as Uncommon sense and I hope you can join me in raising a toast to its’ two fingered salute at this ever more regulated world.

* Not Carol. She worked that out LONG AGO. About ten minutes after we met probably.

** I’ve asked my archivist, and she tells me this is true. Although there’s a few thousand examples to consider.

Musings from 40,000 feet

On By AlexIn Other stuff, Pretentious nonsenseLeave a comment

A little out of sequence but I thought it’d gone when I found a bit of the treasured memory stick hanging from the mouth of our dog. Luckily he only ate the lid. Seemed to quite enjoy it to. Anyway.. flying to South Africa (“Welcome to the Basket Case of the Word“), I wrote this:

I am sat here, alone, cynically observing advanced states of catatonia in airline supplied romper suits. They are all pissed of course, downed by measures that would stun a hearty donkey. And shrouded under duvets of the purest white that put me in mind of a legion of dead, fat, middle aged corporate warriors

I’m sober through a combination of a waiting hire car, and the enduring memory of an incident many years ago involving multiple bottles of wine, and nearly being turned back at American customs. So my ears are full of engine roar displacement music, and I’m left with eight hours of nothing to do but sneer at a plethora of business class worthies – each thinking they are more important than each other.

They are clearly more important than me. The whole experience from collection in a posh car driven by an old man with values slightly right of Genghis Kahn, to being whisked through security by a pretty women who knew my name feels like it should be happening to someone else. I’m mentally back on the train to a factor of about five – this is not my world, these are not my people, I don’t belong here.

The Virgin “upper class wing” – their words, never mine – describes this feeling in spades. It’s clearly been designed to a brief of “funky” and so split between zones of fun, work, chill out, and emergency haircuts. I’m about as close to Amish in spaces like this as you can get. Wandering about, waiting to be thrown out until I find something that looks visibly close to a bar.

Grabbing a beer served by two happy barmen who talk about their customers – between serving cocktails to the type of people who cannot demean themselves by looking their lessers in the eye – so we swap stories of arseholes, and watch the death throes of English Rugby on the big screen. They love their jobs to be fair, it’s good money and better to be away from the general bottle throwing population out in the public areas.

Having found some kindred spirits, I extend my shoulder chip to the sit down bar found on the plane. When everyone else has passed out, the cabin crew tell me that – even at a third full – all the profit in at this end of the plane, and everyone downstream in the cheap seas are nothing more than organic baggage.

I risk a non committal smile as a defence mechanism in the same way I’ve failed to kick off about my drivers’ “they come over here taking our jobs” rant a few hours earlier. For which there are many reasons, the sort of reserve the English feel allows dictators to invade sovereign countries, a weary acceptance that I’m not clever enough to make people see another side to an argument, and the guilt that comes with me pushing the firm to pay for me to fly this way.

People lampoon Billy Connolly with the dichotomy of his castles and working class welding stories. I feel a bit like that. I’m desperately proud of being brought up in a small house with a proper coal cellar, but still secretly love the trappings of the business traveller.

Bloody hell, that’s such a craven admission I think I’ll risk a beer. It’s that or I’m going to start poking sleepy passengers with an accusing finger and a demand to know where they get off being such dickheads.