Voodoo in the Chilterns, originally uploaded by Alex Leigh.

Last time I post pictures of the pinkster I promise*. Slipped in a quick ride last night and first impressions are all pretty damn positive.

It flies through singletrack, bobs a bit like my first Kona (although this may be solved by some platform trickery on the shock but who the hell knows?), and is really flickable and flighty. Swapping lines is a breeze, the whole frame feels taut and springy without being flexy.

Actually I expected it would be like the Spesh Epic I borrowed in Canada – a hardtail most of the time but works like a full suss when you need it. It isn’t. It’s a short travel fs bike like my old Superlight .

And none the worse for that.

It certainly isn’t a race bike as stomping on the pedals makes the simple suspension work too hard. But to travel fast on bumpy ground, carry speed through corners and give you enough trail feel so you know you’re having fun, it’s a whole boxfull of ticks.

Oh and see all those leaves? Riding in short sleeves, on mostly hard baked trails and being blooded by all manner of sharp, head high vegetation. So it feels like summer, smells like summer, stings like summer but looks like Autumn 🙁

Can’t ride it anymore this weekend tho as we’re off to a 40th Birthday party. Where I expect to get drunk with old blokes and have non ironic conversations on the state of the pensions industry.

Joy 😉

* this may well be a lie.

Most of you won’t know Sarah. She was the second party in the infamous ChocolateGate scandal and subsequent sugar overload which defused a major diplomatic incident.

Sarah was supposed to be responsible for project governance, but soon turned native and became embroiled in the tissue of lies and web of deceit that passes for our deployment strategy. She was also in charge to blame for creating a spreadsheet of such complexity and depth we’d started to call her Enron. There is more than a mild suspicion that the willies in the current financial markets may be because she’d sold on our budget overrun to a clutch of world banks.

I fully expect, come Monday morning, to be back to our original approach of scrabbling around at the back of the virtual sofa and demanding money with menaces from other project teams. Sarah also was a key part of me retaining my – admittedly – loose grasp on reality by dealing with our insanely complicated room booking system on my behalf, depositing industrial chunks of confectionery on my desk when crap diary management meant no lunch, and making me laugh when I felt like belting someone.

We fully expected her to grow old like the rest of us working on the project that will never end but in a frankly desperate attempt to break free, she decided to get pregnant and move to Lincolnshire.

Anyway, after a beery good bye yesterday, I though she deserved a final send off into the wilds of cabbage country from the virtual immortality of the hedgehog.

Bye Sarah, best of luck and we’re going to miss you. Oh and can you please burn all copies of the budget before you leave 🙂

It seems appropriate to start with an old joke “ Hey, fatty you need to get into shape / I am in shape, round is a shape. Middle aged, middle English spread is apparently the blight of what used to be known as the ˜middle class’, but is now referred to as ABC-1 two kids, one house, two cars, one mistress, three tvs, two pointless hobbies and an impending divorce by marketing nonces.

You’d have thought being porky would be the least of their worries, and yet Gym membership is the second biggest growth industry after Viagra* for the over forties. Not exactly keen to throw myself in with this fat club, yet physical evidence reveals wobbly bids heading south from an emerging double chin, through a pair of quivering man boobs, flabby under arm hangs and a booming belly that is beginning to throw it’s weight around.

Yet in my tiny little mind, an Adonis like figure strides purposefully across the earth, while the simple mirror reflects a pot bellied stumbler risking asphyxiation by continually sucking it all in.

Much of this unwanted padding is merely long term storage for beer and while this presents a simple solution the issue of being more than you want, it would need to be some kind of medical emergency before I considered abandoning liquid therapy. And even if the best diagnostic minds promised death in a month if you carry on, I’d still need to weigh up the pros and cons.

Realistically I cannot exercise any more because riding bikes already bites huge chunks out of the spare time cake. And this already presents an interesting body pattern with the lower half resembling a rugged outdoorsy type while gazing upwards from the navel projects the image of a fat man living the donut dream.

The prospect of gym membership is an anathema to me; I just cannot bring myself to oxygenate the rarefied air of the narcissistic Body Nazis’. And we all know the fib that is home exercise equipment – a double jeopardy of a usage pattern tapering from every day to no bloody way, in three dreary months, and the ensuing guilt that can only be assuaged by inhaling an industrial block of chocolate.

So instead, I’ve been trying these new designer sit ups where you crunch and gurn, while lying flat and staring at the ceiling. There’s a parallel activity that probably burns more calories and doesn’t get you to thinking that the entire top floor of your house needs re-plastering.

Anyway, that’s probably not enough. I could consider altering my diet but it’s really not that bad, aside from a penchant for fatty cheese and lashings of buttered toast, chocolate and crisps rarely move me from supine slacking on the sofa. Salad is an option but not a good one, it is merely crinkly water over-branded by marketing

But then I thought why bother? Am I actually unhealthy? No. Is their stuff that’d be easier if I was a stone or so lighter (aside from snake hipping into ten year old jeans)? Not so much that I’m prepared to put in significant effort . Am I so cravenly insecure that I think body shape is in some way going to improve how I’m viewed or how I view myself?

H’mm not sure about that, better have a couple of beers to consider my answer.

*I made that up for the purpose of comedic merit. Possibly not worth it.

Is there a statute of limitations on stupidity? If not, then I’m going to forcefully prosecute my case in the style of a barrack room lawyer. This lunchtime I wasted a unhappy chunk of what little life I have left, searching the Strand for that simplest of staples “ shoe polish.

Having passed 13 themed pubs, a thousand Starbucks and every third shop selling overpriced tourist tat, I stumbled into a foot cladding emporium specifically in business to separate the rich from their money. Once we’d established that even if I’d horrifically lost both feet in a shaving accident, I still couldn’t afford any of their main product line, we embarked on a insanely complicated treatise on the exciting advances recently made in “lifestyle shoe grooming“

At the end of which I wore a glazed expression and held no recognisable polish. Instead I was dispatched streetwards with a polish quick, deep shine applicator guaranteed to improve my sex life, deliver untold wealth and as a trivial aside relieve me of dirty shoes Also relieved my wallet of about twenty quid.

This got me thinking – what happened to the normal rules of selling before marketing went nova? I was eating a yogurt that enthused significantly more fruit; more fruit that what? A sausage? And then this morning brushing my teeth with a paste – sorry formulated cleaning agent – trumpeting 30{45ac9c3234d371044e23e276755ef3a4dde8f1068375defba7d385ca3cd4deb2} more cleaning power? Compared to string?

Tell me it is not just me that sees this as nonsense. Marketing is pervasive and intrusive and I’d just, for once, like to buy something I want to buy not something that someone with braces and an overegged view of their own importance wants to sell me. Obviously, pining for halcyon days is inextricably linked with being prodded past the end of the thirties gangplank, but it does give me a fine excuse to post this shop which shall be receiving my patronage should I ever fiscally recover from the debts imposed by modern marketing.

And let me leave you with this. Those of us with a certain wisdom earned through the University of hard knocks and honed by windswept age know that marketing will never affect us. We’re too life-savvy, to clever by half and too old by three quarters to fall into those crudely baited traps laid down by people who lie for a living*. For us, it’s function over form, product over piffle and no one who air kisses and uses finger quotes is every going to convince us differently.

Tell me again, what does Beans Mean?

* this is marketing people I’m talking about. Not politicians. They’d be rubbish at marketing because we know they are lying all the time. It’s the opening of the mouth that gives it away.

In exactly the same ways as some corner of a foreign field is forever England, the same can be said for Yorkshire. This is because, wherever we end up, we take a bit of it with us “ normally the slice which finds bars dangerous places for money and people a bit mouthy for their brains.

And the reason for this is that everything and everyone is compared unfavourably to some utopian vision of where we were born but couldn’t wait to leave. Hypocrisy is narrowly relegated just behind grumpiness in our rambling hierarchy of regional traits.

One of the owners of our Devonshire holiday retreat is a Westy hailing from the Ridings on the border of Lancashire. This is a much disputed hotbed of geographical angst, where Yorkshire overspills into our hated neighbour much like an extreme case of middle age spread.

At school, this bulge into the wrong side of the Pennines was considered to be of similar importance to Alsace-Lorraine being repatriated back to France from Germany after the treaty of Versailles. I kid you not

Before GPS, we found out where people lived by their accents and this old persons skill can still range fellow Yorkies to about thirty miles. So once bonded on county grounds, we fell back to easy regional stereotypes as if happily ensconced on our own virtual Ilkley Moor.

Ted: Nice camera you have there, must’ve cost a few bob
Al: Got it 2^nd hand off a mate. Wouldn’t pay full price for one, that’d be soft
Al : That 4be4 in the drive, is that yours? Looks new
Ted: Well, it is but I beat t’dealer up until he gave me five grand off and first use of ˜er indoors. Anyroad, you need a proper off roader here [ waves hand indicating motoring hazards not immediately obvious in the soft rolling countryside.]
Al: [nods sagely]Right thee are. Reckon you’ll be needing it with all this rain
Ted: [scanning the cloudy sky]: Aye, looks like it’ll be proper wet again. Still not like my days as a boy. Most years, we swam t’school in our duffle coats and wellies, spent first hour draining playground wi’ leaky buckets and then drank what were left
Al: know what tha means. In t’winter, we sledged to school on family dog and t’weak bairns were left to die in t’snowdrifts. One lad, came from so far over yonder [ huge sweep of arm for emphasis ] he were generally found riding his Pa’s Yak
Ted: Yak? Bloody ˜ell, where did he park it?
Al: Bit odd really. He used to rent it out at break for soft lads who couldn’t find wimmin for.. well you know
Ted: Ah well good to see it being put to good use. Surprised tho young boy’d be ready for a Yak
Al: We were surrounded by bloody great cows wi’horns. We trained, trained I tell thee on Yaks before moving ont’ rough stuff

[Short pause while we considered whether bestiality could ever be a good thing]

Ted What happened to yon yak then?
Al: Went t’donkey sanctuary. Proper mental it were by fifth year
Ted: [cautiously]: Why’s that then?
Al: Poor bugger had its’ brains fucked out
Ted [strokes chin] Aye, well fair dos, guess it had a good innings

We parted amiably not sure if we’d been speaking out loud. Being proper Yorkshiremen, neither of us would admit to actually dreaming up huge whoppers for the sole purpose of trumping our regional colleague.

Still I’ve noticed they’ve kept their dog on a short leash ever since.

* other nonsensical dialect is available including the pithy tha’s not as green as tha cabbage is painted and the almost Shakespearian bloody ˜ell, I couldn’t get me ˜at on

So why is it every news anchor and his excitable producer keep trying to tell us that it is? This last week, a parade of heavyweight but interchangeable talking heads have attempted to construct a logical straight line between floods and global warming without passing through any points marked ˜proper science’, ˜historical precedent’ or even ˜common sense’.

These Serious Men In Wellies, as I’ve come to think of them, are summoning the same meteorological worthies who predicted the entire South East of England would be a Dustball by July of this year. This was, of course, before the rain started and the talk of water shortages stopped way back sometime in May.

But so desperate are the SMIW to create more doom from the gloom of waist deep flooding, they load the weather charlatans with explosive questions such as Well Global Warming is certainly a factor here, and it can only get worse wouldn’t you agree?

What follows is the doomsayer, at the dry end of the camera link, waffling total nonsense interjected with the odd nugget of useful information. It goes something like well actually the research suggests warmer and longer summers [ pause for dramatic effect ] but also for more rain as well. Huh?

That’s from the same box of wrongness that sunshine and showers came from and yet it doesn’t deter His Moistness The Smug from turning to camera “ with a sweeping arm to indicate inland sea where civilisation recently habituated “ and ending his report with a brief summary on how the world will end by about next Thursday.

Don’t get me wrong here – we’ve performed all sorts of selfish buggeration of the planet and it’s clear to anyone not President of the United States that climate change is pretty much unstoppable. But the media must stop binding every rain storm, strong wind or two unbroken days of sunshine into some kind of climatically catastrophic event.

If the Jet Stream wasn’t sat squarely above Bracknell and the Azores High could be arsed to play nicely on our Southern shores, we’d all be washing in each others wee and having the perfect excuse not to clean the car. So if the bloody BBC doesn’t stop treating me like an idiot, I shall be forced to unleash BOTH the Badger Berserkers AND the Ninja Voles. You want a catastrophic event “ then these highly trained military mammals are more than happy to oblige.