Did anyone catch the Rookie F1 Brit aquaplaning his low slung rocket at 200 MPH, on slippy tarmac occasionally rising above a deluged skid pan? No? Me Neither, that’s not what this is about. Oh sure, the barely-long-trousered wunderkid has skill, balls and attitude in spades but to hell with him, I’ve been getting wet.

Full Wets means Summer is over and Winter is coming. Out with the Gortex covered shoes, shorts and jacket, power up the big lights, dig out the longs and fix an expression of extreme stoicism on your fizog.

And then get in the car and drive to the station. Still ample time to get jiggy with the moist button in London tho.

With wet comes dark and splashing through Hyde Park last night, I noticed there were no other bikes within spitting rain distance. But that’s because I’d forgotton about the special breed of night rider – the ninja cyclist. Dresses entirely in black atop a black steed and – another scorpion pit offence – wearing dark sunglasses. Only when the whites of his eyes were briefly illuminated did the proximity alarm start mentally dinging like a bastard.

A desperate wrench of the bars was almost enough to avoid impact and absolutely enough to unclip a previously pedalling foot. What follwed was a lung emptying ‘whuuuffff’ as my – until then – silent assasin exited over his bars and the rather louder curse of a man stopping a fast rotating pedal with his ankle.

It took me a while to find the fella. He was reposed in a handy bush, earphones still installed and groping around himself as if searching for a missing limb. But in fact he was fine – if a little stoned or pissed – as demonstrated by a drawled “hey man, that was RUDE’

I have no idea what this means. It is the street language of young people and, frankly, if there going down the Darwinism route of stealth commuting in a city of a million cars, then it’s a dying language. I fetched him out of the schrubbary, spent a comedy thirty seconds attempting to separate black night from black bike and sent him wobbling on his way with a shake of this grizzled yet wise old head.

Which hurt almost as much as my ankle after a phone based injury I may share with you tomorrow. This morning I woke with a club foot and stumped around in a dark bedroom trying not to wake my wife. This is exactly what happened once the difficult combination of a limp and no light navigated me unerringly to a toe stubbing interface with the foot of the bed.

I’m clearly getting old. Only today I was musing whether it was socially acceptable to set off the fire alarm so as to see how short one of the Girl’s skirts are. I was coming down on the affirmative before a realisation that this was unlikely to provoke a favourable reaction during appraisal times next week.

This time I’m taking the chicken

Somewhere is this crowded, dirty capital city, I lost my commuting mojo. I am continually losing stuff nowadays; keys, sunglasses, one glove, the plot – what Americans call “having a senior moment“. I like to think that, in fact, it is because my mind is too highly trained for the minutiae of life, and aside from being a wheeled Alvin Stardust, it’s not really much of a concern.

But this was different, it crept up on me starting with a certain listlessness before rapidly escalating to failing to race when challenged, and not hissing at Hinged Harry And His Bicycle Clips. I used to love commuting but it has been on the slide since that chastising incident involving the simultaneous awareness of a red light and an angry policeman. Lately I’ve been looking for excuses not to bother – even contemplating a return to the horrid tube.

Commuting without competing is boring – if I’m not racing, I’m trying to slash half a second off a virtual time trial or improve my trackstanding or some other such nonsense. And for competition, you need to have your muscles spiked with white hot anger, driven on by rage and sustained by a certain bloody mindedness.

Tonight, I suffered what I’m thinking of as a Samuri as this seems to happen to him on almost every ride. So dickhead roars past and immediately turns left, no signal, no chance of stopping. I slam on the binders and slam into his front wing, not hard enough to fall but scary enough to trigger a solid 30 seconds of invective to his many and varied shortcomings including the one in his trousers.

And then I realised lately I’d become a little craven when faced with the daily them and us conflicts. Feeling second class, first with big wagons, then taxis, then scooters and occasionally other cyclists. Not folders tho, it hadn’t plumbed those depths just yet. But not now, the righteous fire was well and truly lit. This nearly accident was a catalyst converter putting me smack bang back into the game. Pulling a few deep-breath-go-now moves felt good, as did sprinting between red lights, but still not running them.

I am seemingly alone in this nod to traffic deference. The police are handing out£30 penalty fines like sweets in the playground. But it’s more about crowd pleasing than deterrents. One guy tho particularly caught my attention; road bike, rucksack, lairy SPDs, half upholstered in Lycra and half in big hair. Any more “look at me” and he’d have been a ringer for Posh Spice.

He cruised through every light regardless of colour, traffic situation or pedestrians assuming a red light mean they could safely cross. My frustration was tempered by the internal radio being tuned to Top Gun “I’m not leaving my wingman” as twitching legs were desperate to give chase. The ying and yang of light sequencing gave him no obvious advantage and I finally caught him outside Queenies house. And I had a plan. Retuning to 5-Live football analogies and ludicrously comparing myself to the pint sized predator that is Michael Owen. Permanently injured, lost a bit of pace, written off by everyone and more than a little pissed off.

I got the jump with my microscopic knowledge of phasing and then slowed right down. Quick personality flip.

/Top Gun Mode on
“What are you doing”
“I’m slowing down”
“You’re doing WHAT?“*
Top Gun Mode off/

He cruised past like a smug Fozzy Bear with his skinny tyres and fat head, but like I said I had a plan; on the shoulder of the last defender, timing is everything. Curve out from the inside and sprint like a bastard giving it the big berries. He never saw me coming as I disdainfully, dispatched him into the top corner. He did see me go tho, as I cut inside a bus, sucked in elbows so not to clip the metal hedge and then skipped into the Hyde Park Traffic chaos during a five second red light amnesty.

That my frizzy friend is how you run a red light.

Somewhere is this crowded, dirty capital city, I lost my commuting mojo And somewhere in my head I found it.

* The ability to remember entire dialogue tracks from movies seen some fifteen years ago is a skill I feel I could have used more.

Indicative of the traffic insanity that is the London arterial road system, my commute passes 22 lights in a total of 4.1 miles – four of which could be labelled tricky. Especially when clipped in trackstanding generally starts wobbly and finishes either in intense humiliation or death by bus crushing.

So you have to use some of the cruder arts of cycling; learn the phasing, be able to spring like a madman or roll like a snail, scout alternate routes and failing all that, cheat. It’s akin to crafting a maximum break in snooker – except for dressing up like Victorian butlers, the use of a table and any balls, unless you’re including the spheroids of steel required for this maximum effort. 22 lights breaks down nicely into 15 reds, and seven colours.

Foul shots include running reds, using cars as rests and any dabs at all, even if it was only you who saw it. Like a 147, you’re always it planning it but you mustn’t think to hard about it because that way lies failure by performance anxiety. First tough lights looking good, sprint over the Marylebone road, skip through the next two sets and then a quick double off the cushion to avoid a long red at Edgeware road. This leaves a tricky shot that is the shoot into Hyde Park Corner, traffic solid from the right, so slow weave into the left lane and commit to a death or glory to be positioned for the next light. This nearly ends in a t-bone from a desperate Merc gambling on amber.

I acknowledge the internal applause as the break nudges over a 100 but the most difficult part of the break is still to come. A slow filter gains me a green onto Constitution Hill and a split decision “ but a good one “ to take easy brown over a difficult black bumps me through a slippy dirt track to miss being held up outside Queenies. I’m disappointed not to try out my trick shot to beat the next long hold but another green sees me heading for the crux “ Trafalgar square.

I’ve looked at this from all sides of the table and there are no easy pots. Not enough room to circle, off camber makes even the good trackstanders struggle, basically it’s down to luck. And today I was lucky, if narrowly avoiding being stomped by a big ref bus can ever be counted as lucky. Still I had slipped up his inside “ so to speak “ to avoid the indeterminable pedestrian lights outside charring cross.

My reward was a veldt of green awaiting my charging steed. Onto the colours now and the first three dispatched with a sprint as they made to change. Last tough shot coming up over Waterloo Bridge. Deft, tight filter “ oh I so wanted to unclip as I ducked under a mirror between bar wide lorries “ put me in perfect position to dispatch the light and I’m away around Aldwych heading for a simple blue-pink-black of three fast lights.

The first two were green, the last may not have been even as I lined it up to punch it into the bottom pocket.; I was ready to jump off the bike, hug random passers by and claim the£1.47 first prize I’d awarded myself. Unfortunately even the most colour blind may have noticed the colour of that light was not a combination of red and yellow, more red and yellow.

In my defense, I never saw it, as far as I was concerned, it was black.

This was the incredulous question posed, to me, the other night by a real policeman. The main reason for his incredulity had been my brazen running of a red light that he had stopped at. I’ve always thought that if you’re going to break the law, then it must be done with a certain style. And self referential panache normally sits well with a belly full of lager which, obviously, I’d consumed during the previous four hours.

What started as a brief after work drink inexorably finished as a train wreck. So impressed was I with the new smoke free pubs, that I had a number of additional drinks to celebrate. On sober reflection, probably not the greatest idea for a man about to play with 25 minutes of dangerous traffic.

Due to my level of social confusion and enveloped in the happy fug of the properly trolleyed, I never even saw the red light. Or the police van. I was barely aware of the claxon call of the siren and associated flashing lights until Mr. Plod barked out his understandable question. The rest of the conversation went something like this:

Me: “Yes”
Him: “Didn’t you notice the big white van with Police written all down the side”
Me: “No”
Him: “And the red light, did that register at all?”
Me: “Nope”
Him: “Do you have any reason or excuse why you did that”
Me: [thinks, comes up blank]: “Er, No”
Him: “Have you been drinking this evening sir”
Me: “Oh yes”
Him: “Were you aware that their is a law against being drunk in charge of a bicycle”
Me: “Well, currently, I wouldn’t exactly say I’m in charge of it. Rather the other way round”
Him: “I should give you a ticket for both offences”
Me: “Yep, you probably should”
He rants some more, asks me where I’m going, I reply to the best of my dribbling ability. He decides to let me off. In pity,I think.
Him: “I suggest you use the cycle paths and ride slowly to the station sir. I don’t want to be fetching you off the tarmac”
Me: “Thanks alot. It’s not true what they say about the police is it?”
Him: [narrows eyes]: “What would THAT be Sir?”
Me: [oops]: “Oh nothing, finer bunch of fellows you couldn’t hope to find, I’ll be off then, ok?”

I did feel like an idiot tho and more so when I sobered up. The decision not to share with him that I had to ride 6 – mostly lightless – miles home at the far end of the train ride was probably the right one. This part of the journey was spent mostly either musing how I’d manged to lose both my decent rear light AND my lock on a four mile wobble through town or – blinded by oncoming headlights – in a verge.

Last weekend, I nearly committed to paper hard and fast resolutions about not running red lights anymore (and I’m really only an occasional transgressor (careful how you spell that) now), not getting wound up by cycle hating motorists, not getting involved in pointless altercations, etc, etc.

This morning when a white van carelessly swung across my nose without so much as the whiff of an indication, I couldn’t but help ask if he’d always had a small willy or it’d be hacked off in a nasty industrial accident.

Resolutions you see, not worth the paper they’re not written on.

This morning I made a pact with my inner loony that, whatever the provocation, I would turn the other pedal when tested by the killing zone of the commuting blacktop. This lasted precisely one hundred and seventy yards – I never even made it out of the village.

Yes in a distance that’d struggle to trouble even an arthritic tortoise, my cup floweth over with angst and bile. For – and let me just insert a hollow laugh here – safety the road out to the badlands of the A418 is bollarded at regular interval to prevent desperate cagers from ploughing through fleshy pedestrians. The road narrows to a car width and a bit so thereby posing the equation “aggressive car driver + trembling cyclist > road available”

The man (it always is), determined to save the two seconds he’d have been stuck behind me at 20mph (rather than the 30mph limit through the village), attempted to solve the equation by gunning his engine and banging his horn (is that allowed even in the comfort of your own car?). I responded by plotting a CTC approved route five foot from the curb in case his impatience licensed an attempt to drill me into the curb.

Bollard dispatched, he accelerated past about one inch from my ear throwing out random words and gestures like a man missing most of his frontal lobe. The inner loony was screaming to be unleashed in the form of some international finger language but I was strong. Then the bloke slowed down, pulled along side and starting dishing out supplementary verbals.

The loony rose like an unstoppable curry powered by ten pints of gassy lager and the game was up. Normally, I allow the car driving nutter to make some preposterous statement giving me time to calm down and formulate something close to a rational response. Not today, the loony spluttered like a cold engine before unloading an verb laden invective on wide ranging subjects to whit: Bollards, Fucking idiots, Golf Drivers, Wankers, Impatient tossers and pointless fuckhandles were prominent.

His ire was almost as spectacular, fuelled by my fist waving rant. But the loony went properly beserk when he made – what he felt – was a winning point regarding car tax, him paying it and me not. After explaining that it is actually vehicle excise duty and, anyway, it isn’t a carte blanche to exterminate two wheeled road users – and even if it was I pay it too, so would it be ok for me to fetch my car and run him over?

Things went somewhat downhill from there. He offered to fight me in lieu of having anything intellectual going in his favour. This caused a brief internal hiatus as I battered down the hatches and refused to allow el loono to start swinging. It was close though, very close indeed but I was bloody annoyed to be dragged down to a insult trading level, yet I don’t think any calm logic would’ve changed his base position of “you fucking cyclists are the scum of the Earth“.

Coming home, another hot hatch (translation: small penis’d driver) screamed round a slower car and nearly totalled me as I was minding my business on other side of the carridgeway. He even had time to flip me the bird as I headed for the bushes.

It’s starting to get to me now. I don’t think 2007 will finish without punches being thrown because I’m running out of other options.

I am sat here snuffling away like a small, nervous mammal rooting around in the undergrowth. Occasionally this pathetic and yet volubly liquid vocal discharge is dispatched to the aural boundaries, whilst a wheezing cough hacks its way out of constricted lungs.

Now I’m not one of those sad hypochondriacs with so little in their life that they must accost and bore complete strangers with a tedious list of their symptoms. I’m more your self deluding, pathological fibber with an unreconstructed mortality fear which “ I’m sure you’ll agree “ is far more interesting. Sulking will follow if you don’t.

But, be absolutely clear, this is not whining; as all of my mental angst is focussed on white hot irritation leaving no space for vanity melancholy. As only last week, after a successful re-insertion into the heady biorhythms of commuting, I triumphed over a proper roadie while he was trying and everything. So my current status of worrying about the aerobic impact of attempting a set of stairs is on the fucking irritating side of bloody annoying.

Sliding off a homebound train, fortified by a training curry (we forwent a fatty pudding in lieu of another healthy lager), my transit home was separated only by six miles, a random scrambling of the iprodder and a gentle turning of Biryani heavy legs.

Continue reading “Chasing Bikes” →

Welcome to your commute. The local time is 06:40, the outside temperature is a chilly ten degrees and our arrival time is expected to be 09:05 unless someone succeeds in killing you first.

Back off holiday, back to playing with the desperate traffic, back to maximum concentration and minimum road sense. Whiffing of the closet masochist, I’d been looking forward to joining the battle and “ as expected “ the grimy jewel of our capital city didn’t disappoint.

First up Seymour drive closed again for reasons closely aligned to because we can and do I honestly give off the slightest impression of giving a fuck?. Well fuck you right back, couple of hard lefts stretching aching legs past lines of stationary traffic before crafting a cheeky move with slightly more pavement than the highway code advocates. From the frustrated horn section behind me, I’ll have to upgrade that to properly cheeky.

Love it. Love it. Love it.

Summer sun burns off the cloud and I burn off down a down a festival constrained funnel of Hyde Park. Facing tourists adjusting focal lengths by stepping blithely into my path, I begin with a pathetic dinging of my bell and finish by leaving a carbon bar end burn on their arse. Keeping it real there Mr. Livingstone, let’s do lunch.

Only by engaging Colin McCrae Sega Rally Mode can progress me made through the random perambulation of squeezed humanity on an ever thinning track. Elbows out, Bar ends to the fore again and an expression that politely but firmly expresses the dangerous truth that you are nothing more than mobile slalom in the path of my morning coffee.

Ride on in the sunshine, break a few more rules, bait lycra roadies and attempt to perfect clipped in trackstands before flipping the security guard a flash of my pass and a hidden finger. Dump the bike and hunt down the dripping bacon breakfast of champions. Not bad for a Monday morning, not bad at all.

The end of the day starts with beer which instantly imbues bravery as per the law of lager armour. Bravery instantly tested by a taxi attempting to save ten seconds by smashing me into small body parts using the curb as a mallet. Survival instinct kicks in and he’s almost as surprised as me to find a beery mountain biker hanging onto his passenger door.

As our six wheeled carriage wobbles down the Strand, I breathlessly explain to him to and his “O mouth shaped fare that if he doesn’t cease and desist RIGHT NOW, I shall be punching my way out through the drivers side window.

He fucked off quite pissed off although I hope he didn’t think, even for a moment, that I gave a shit. Believing myself indestructible, a¾ circuit of Hyde Park Corner will live long in the memory filed under mnemonic Go, GO, Oh Shit, Oh Shot OH SHIT, switch lanes “ DON’T LOOK “ safe, don’t you DARE come over here, sprint, spring, looked fucking amber to me, sprint, breathe

Fantastically, London wasn’t done delighting me today. I cruised up about half a mile of 150MPH executive cars travelling at approximately zero due to aforementioned coned off streets. I cannot bequeath them the names of roadworks because the second half of that word was conspicuously missing.

Anyway I counted about half a million pounds worth of leather clad car park before my mental arithmetic was exhausted. The worlds’ most expensive queue began to snarl slowly forwards as the lights changed but I had been and gone before they had even reached ramming speed. My delight was raised to a level that I can only term non Yorkshire when it became apparent that some brain stunted arse had parked his van on the yellow box and the queue was stationary again despite the green light.

Sometimes commuting is shit “ cold, dark, horrid, miserable and dangerous. Today was not one of those days.

* Spookily the first track on a perfectly shuffled riding mix. Is it wrong to like Snow Patrol? Oh I see, I am deeply sorry.

Last night while riding home into a gloomy, late spring evening, I failed to crack the tough navigational challenge of finding my house. My third year of commuting has been ushered in with barely a whimper after years one and two were at least accorded a hedgehog sized nod. But the event was marked by a failure of muscle memory grooved by 250 return trips and while the autopilot tripped out, I tripped on towards the badlands of Aylesbury.

But for a sudden jerky awareness that my present surroundings were unfamiliar, the termination of the ride would have been exactly that. Thursday night at dusk in the a town populated by a lesser class of boozy thug is not a safe place for anyone without a tatoo or an anger management problem. I would have been killed and eaten and then very possibly charged for the privilege.

I can only put this misjudgement down to one of two things. Either my cognitive functions are already starting to fade or, the terrifying level of concentration I was applying to work related problems means I have started to really care about my job.

Either is a worry, frankly.

You may be astonished to hear that I occupy a very important position in the firm. But please restrain your flabber from gasting once you understand that this lofty perch is merely geographical. While some lesser lights toil in open plan darkness, bribery and sustained sprout induced germ warfare secured me the rights to a window seat. So a bank of mucky windows separate me from London city smog and the occasional desperate urge to leave the building from the seventh floor.

In summer, this expanse of glass focuses significantly more dangerous radiation than an industrial microwave, except during rainstorms where each watery drop mocks my soon to be moist personage. Personal grim reapers the lot of them and “ if you listen very carefully “ you can hear them malevolently whisper he’s mine, mine, MINE.

The drumming nemesis of my homeward commute was perfectly accompanied by the head to desk counterpoint beat of a man who is coming to terms with a recent courageous decision to remove the mudguards from his bikes. The compelling rationale behind this I tell you what, why not do a rain dance instead choice was “ and I’m sure you’ll be laughing almost as much as I am here “ because they were aesthetically disagreeable.

So having splashed through forty five minutes of elephant trunk playtime, my entire being graded a level of immersion not seen since the Man From Atlantis hit our screens back in 79. Mark Harris and I began to share some disturbing similarities as desperate Darwinism was adding oxygenating gills and a food processing system based on osmosis. The key difference was tho was while old water-boy seemed to be enjoying his lot, I was having a properly miserable time.

If this is wet, I was ———————————————-> and still heading in that direction of travel. The only difference between riding and drowning was a bloody minded refusal to die of water damage. My shoes were a watersport park for a party of lemmings, my arse was pebble dashed by a one inch tyre bringing the waterwheel bang up to date, and my bum crack could easily double as a deep water harbour, and I’m bloody sure hundreds of Cuban refugees were queuing up to dock.

After about an eternity, it was finally over and I waded indoors to the delight of the children who were broadly convinced that Daddy looked far better as a duck. I think that’s what they said, it was pretty close to how I felt anyway.

Worryingly, there are some who live amongst us “ similar and yet not the same because they are missing a vital organ; to whit, one brain. Spot them as they enjoy nay embrace this type of wet and miserable riding. This is the same therapy group who espouse the joy of winter mud enemas and apparently take perverse pleasure in racing around a field with five hundred other recently escaped nutters.

These are dangerous people and should not be approached.

The forecast for the remainder of the week reads like this; Rain, More rain, Misery, Trench foot, Mudslides, Creation of inland seas. So I’m off to the zoo for some surreptitious animal gathering and then onward to the Boatyard.

So that was summer was it? Thanks.