Remember Feng Shui? If so, you’ll remember how to confidently attune your Chi to furniture arranged in confident positions according to the principles of bagua.  Very popular in the 90s before we had Wellness, Influencers and TikTok taking up the slack for monetised grifts selling maximum benefit for minimum input.

I’m sure there is something in it, but mostly for those emptying the bank accounts for that cohort of spiritually curious true believers. See also those of us allegedly immune to bike marketing 😉

And while I may be all cock-snooping at genres entirely un-researched and lazily stereotyped, I am a firm fan of the tidy shed. Couple of reasons; firstly with the chaos strewn world outside the door, an environment of order inside offers peace to troubled souls. Especially if the beer fridge occupies one of those confident positions.

Secondly it means no bicycles have been injured in the making of this photograph. It is an unchallenged truism in our riding group that any maintenance undertaken by Al, will trigger a second and far more complex repair, undertaken by a registered adult with more than the vaguest grasp of tool use.

Tools on the wall and parts in the drawers are marked safe from the collision site, where the blast radius is ring fenced by a random selection of items, all repurposed for idiot level percussive engineering. A bit like this:

What, I hear you ask, is going on here? Some kind of major frame surgery? Multiple bearing removal perhaps? Disassembly of a complex sequence of shims, axles and bolts previously masquerading as a working suspension linkage? Something unquestionably nasty involving tubeless tyres?

Not even close. This avalanche of tools have been pressed into service for the changing of a single gear cable. Well two actually because when you ride through three and a half grim winters with nary a thought to preventative maintenance, the action of selecting a gear and the actual gear selected are no longer following the traditional rules of cause and effect.

Instead something – probably quantum* – happens which is either the mech stubbornly refusing to shift at all or cascading noisily across the cassette like a mechanical spider high on bad Meth. Sub optimal, so with a long Dry January afternoon at odds with a ever present wet sky, I attended the shed with a strong mug and tea and a determined expression.

I won’t bore you further with the non linear path from investigation to resolution, other than to say that – while mistakes were made – it was a triumph for a man who lacks patience, basic mechanical skills and no access to his normal medication. So proud of my endeavours, I sent Matt a picture of the finished work, after which he gently pointed out all the things that were wrong.

In my defence, I was occasionally distracted. Mostly by the job at hand. Rather than pick up any tools, I felt time was better spent dusting off an old MacBook and inserting a new operating system forcefully on its aging hardware. Now it acts as an 80s juke box projecting tinny audio to a bluetooth speaker. Sure I could already do that with my phone, but we can still all agree this was time well spent.

Running out of other shed based activities, I attended the matter in hand which quickly escalated to filth-encrusted bolts, scabby cables, mud cloaked parts, followed closely by an assorted collection of questionable adjustments I convinced myself would noticeably increase ride quality. **

Anyway job done, cables installed, shifting returned from the quantum realm and bike prepped for the next filthy outing. That filth is why I’m ignoring the extremely worn drive train and associated parts squeaking out requests for a mercy killing. Not happening until Spring is firmly anchored to the ground conditions.

And even flushed with this limited success, the prospect of attending to more difficult jobs reminded me that being lucky is a privilege not a right. Instead I went on a shed tidying spree that was both mostly pointless and extremely satisfying. By the end of which I couldn’t help but ponder “you know, there’s almost room for ANOTHER bike in here”

Hold that thought 🙂 Until then the hardtail with all the gears is to be pitted against the trails with all the rain. Best I can hope for is a score draw.

*After watching Oppenheimer, I have fallen down a Quantum Mechanics YouTube hole. I didn’t expect to emerge any smarter, which tracks closely to the reality of each video somehow rendering me even more stupid 😉

**I think we can all work out how well that went.