Air was involved, tyres or arses were not. A quarterly Asthma checkup and the peak flow meter is the undisputed big gun of lung levelling metrics. There’s a scary graph of past performance with soaring summits of invincibility shadowed by deep valleys of potential bungalow ownership.

2006 average was about 600, the first half of this year down a worrying 20{45ac9c3234d371044e23e276755ef3a4dde8f1068375defba7d385ca3cd4deb2} on that. The units of measurement is irrelevant but the top line number is not. Most of you frisky young souls out there scale unworldly peaks of 800+ assuming you have been playing nicely with your breathing chambers, and are the non dead side of 40. Hence my excuse for panting like a black dog on a hot summers day fifteen seconds into any climb. Other areas of piss poor performance are not directly related much as I pretend they are.

So when the trend is downwards, the fear spikes hard the other way. And that’s why many of my fellow sufferers cheat before the test. Gulping down surreptitious blasts from their blue inhalers, feasting on the marketing buffet of power breathers or hyperventilating in the bogs before the test. One guy just sits in the waiting room chowing down on Snickers bars which are hardly a performance enhancing drug but it seems to make him happy. Or at least, slightly less hand shakingly nervous.

Today with a clear conscience, a snifter of cold and the remains of a hangover, my number came up and that number was 660. The nurse clearly thought I’d been practicing my technique or had undertaken a back street lung transplant, and my surprise wasn’t far behind.

Always looking on the Yorkshire side of good news, it seems I’ll have to ramraid the excuses bank and find some other reasons why I still climb like a three legged stoat with a head wound. Probably a bike thing, maybe I should get another one.

… but happy. Lovely Autumnal weather turned up in the Quantocks, perfectly aligned with buffed singletrack, truckloads of cake, a great photographer/instructor in Seb Rogers and the cheerful yet tireless photogimp(tm) that is Mike Davis of Bike Magic fame.

I’ll write it up properly after I’ve slept a bit and worked a lot but it’ll be worth the wait if only for the best ever post title I’ve dreamed up.

Yes, I know it’s not up against terribly stiff competition.

I don’t normally repost email jokes because it’s lazy but in this case, I’ll make an exception.

Stand up Northampton NHS, you have a genius in your midst 🙂

Not for a moment did anyone really think I was going to provide a reasoned discussion on the merits of squashy rubber versus messy white gunk did they? Well maybe I could, but only on a special interest forum.

No, my interest in tubeless represents an attempt for 365 days of non travel on the unsanitary nest of the tunnel rat. It fits the same physiological pattern as air travel in that I can only consider it, when every other travel fund has been bankrupted and, I am quite pissed.

Post the team Christmas drink and pre the two day hangover saw me perambulate drunkenly onto the Northern line but even when compared against paying twenty quid for a taxi fare or walking an hour in the rain, it was still undeniably shit. Having beery, impromptu carriage theatre and dodging pools of cooling vomit hardly improved the experience either.

That was about 270 days ago and it has acted as aversion therapy. This morning, the sane option was to spend forty five extra minutes in bed, shower, suit, drive to the station, train and TUBE. Because the office was not my destination, no I was lucky enough to be on the receiving end of two hours of rubbish marketing and worse coffee.

The chosen approach to a 9:30 start at the other end of town was, get up when it’s dark, battle a rain speckled headwind to the station and another one to the office before a super quick shower and suit up. Then a thirty minute walk accompanied by a feeling of rightousness.

I’m too northern to take a taxi when I can walk and too stubborn to take the tube when an alternative presents itself. My smugness at the many degrees of separation between me and corporate man has only been slightly muted by spending two hours last night swapping various bike parts around in a parody of progress.

At the end of the evening, I finished almost exactly where I’d started except for some broken shifting on the big bike. The reason being that many hours R&D at Specialized determined that you must dismantle the entire bike to gain access to the front mech. At which point, you’re hardly in a position to set it up properly, either physically or mentally.

Either I’m special or they are.

It’s me isn’t it?

A few of my saner friends have openly questioned my suitability for the position of World Dictator. While I appreciate and respect their candidness, this type of seditious talk shall end with their brief – yet stimulating – visit to the scorpion pit.

I’ve no time for this new fangled democracy. In my world, it’s strictly one man, one vote and I’m the man with that vote. So once domination of the entire earth has been achieved through a combination of the structured agenda, superbly crafted emails and the unleashing of my mighty pivot tables, there are going to be some changes.

I’m more your evolutionary revolutionary, so fundermental policy change shall be delivered in a number of small steps. Firstly lifts.

Lifts will not stop at any floor below the third level. In a single stroke, I shall cure obesity, remove the need for Gym membership and winkle out anyone likely to be a strain on the Health Service. To ensure sufficient daily exercise, all meetings will involve at least two visits to the ground floor and tardiness shall be met by electric cattle prod.

Until lift manufacturers are ready with the new systems, a tactical change will ensure the request for services to floors one and two be met with a shouted announcement “GET OUT OF THIS LIFT AND UP THE STAIRS YOU LAZY BUGGERS”.

And the cattle prod.

See, I’m getting the hang of it already. If – and I know almost none of you aspire to the call of the higher office – you were leader of the world, what would your first rule change be?

My door is always open to new ideas, but remember the scorpions are ready for any wishy washy nonsense or anyone owning a folding bicycle.

The bloke sat opposite me has the look of a slash/gore episode in a low budget movie. He’s covered from head to toe in a thick, blood-red viscous liquid with horror and confusion alternately chasing across his stunned features.

He has just been assaulted by the drinks trolley on a SwissAir flight back from Zürich. From his lack of animation in that curiously please “don’t fuss/musn’t grumble” English way, he’s clearly trying to shrug off the aftermath of a messy ground zero tomato juice event clustered around his seat.

Other nationalities stereotype their traits as well; the Germans have set up a working committee, provisionally titled – with appropriate brevity –
uber-strubel-trolley-improvement-sub-group-with-focus-on-locking-mechanisms while the Swiss are checking their watches and investigating who can be charged for such an event.

I’m reduced to removing melting ice nestling uncomfortably in the testicle area and wondering out loud if the thrill and glamour of short haul flying has paled somewhat in the last few years.

Firstly there is the unseemly scrum to get onto the plane at Heathrow. It seems ludicrous that the airport can provide such a grotty, overcrowded and just downright unpleasant service and still attract ever more passengers. We’re herded through a maze of zig zags with our toiletries, clothes and dignity being stripped away by bombastic security staff who are clearly selling everything they snatch from your person.

The security scan adds yet more stress while removing the remainder of your clothing, and it seems ever more odd that this is a service in which you’re the paying customer. Only the sight of Arsne Wenger – the Arsenal Manager – being frisked with commendable vigour distracted me from the belief I’d entered some reality show based on Dante’s nine levels of hell. The Gooner legend gazed stoically into the middle distance while the grumpy frisker ensured the big man wasn’t carrying any extra balls into Europe.

The whole thing puts me in mind of being prepared for transportation on a slave ship. And yet when compared to the experience of Zürich, I’m not sure whether it needs to be – even in these times of heightened security. Zürich’s – a bit like its Swiss host – is clean, airy, superbly organised and calm. Heathrow may be up against some unique challenges but it certainly doesn’t seem to be rising to them. Arriving back last night around 9:30 in the evening, the queue for passport – sorry Border – control stretched back to the gates. I leaned wearily against a sign proclaiming “we’re making Heathrow an airport London can be proud of” and thought they must have some pretty low expectations.

Flying is dull at the best of times and short haul is about the worst. You leave an extra hour early to as the entire South East is generally a traffic blackspot, you spend about the same amount of time in mazey misery, cocooned with thousands of other poor souls, occasionally discarding prized belongings in response to barked commands, you wait on the runway while “19 other planes are queued ahead of us” until, finally, the scream of the engines marks the time you’re screwing with the planet.

I know this blog has a job to amuse if only sporadically. But sometimes, there’s a serious point to be made. There has to be a better way than short haul – video conferencing, trains, email, hologram, not bothering, and you can’t help thinking that maybe if the terror organisations aren’t winning, they’re certainly holding there own. You would have to sanguine to the point of medicated or desperate to do business via airlines and yet – bizarrely – more of us are doing it.

Still at the speed that we’re concreting the country, at least there will soon be many alternate runways available. Next time I’m going by goat.