In The Grim.

On By AlexIn Bikes, Road Riding2 Comments

I may have mentioned before how I quite like riding bikes, but always struggled to distill the why from the how. Take this morning, I haul weary arse from warm bed before the cock* has struck six, peer out into the gloomy, wet and general filthy conditions thinking “Yup, looks perfect conditions for a ride”

A sidebar here: At work, I castigate all and sundry for over-designing stuff, building in layers of redundancy and pointless planning for the extremely unlikely. And yet, so terrified of missing my train, I buffer 20 minutes when I should still be sleeping in case of punctures, mechanical disasters or badger attack. Which in eighteen months of commuting has happened exactly once**, and I still missed my train. Meaning I had to wait almost twenty minutes for the next one. Bonkers.

As you were, anyway there is something righteous about riding this time of the year, as so many treat cycling as a three season activity. Instead of keeping calm and carrying on , they worry away at escalating girth, nibble on ugly looking food and – most of all – miss the hidden joy of two wheels always good.

I see them – more so in London – choosing a commuting alternative which includes compression tubes, grimy pavements, multiple delays and frustrations all to be borne in a suit. Then these very same people disappear into the Gym at lunchtime oblivious to the superb cycling facilities right next door. I can’t quite work that out.

I don’t miss riding in London though, except for the odd bout of commuter racing. Too bloody dangerous – whereas now I have the roads to myself and some rather fetching moving pictures as the sun struggles over the horizon. This does not appear to be the happy experience of uber-obsessive cyclist Samuri who seems to be conducting his own daily “DeathWish“ survey.

And while the weather may be filthy, I am dry in breathable fabric, layered in warmth and driven on by the shuffle of a thousand tunes. I arrive at the station, smiling and ready to cash in some hard yards at the bank of the Bacon Butty, while my fellow commuters shiver, snivel and stamp. They are adding clothes as I’m stripping off, breathing in big lungfuls and assuming this is the best part of my day.

It’s always a bit less enthralling heading home, tired, lacking the energy of twelve hours before, but still content to be sandwiching my day doing the stuff I love. Even when bits of that stuff are attempting to blow me off my bike, rip traction from my wheels and blow hard rain into my face. Most of the time, I find myself laughing, I’ve no idea why. Probably early onset dementia.

Tomorrow we’re nightriding in conditions that trigger multiple weather warnings depicting diaster and travel chaos. Not for me, no roads where I’m going. Saturday and Sunday I’ll be out again under thunderous skies and lashing rain although that has more to do with the onset of multiple in-laws. And today was a marker for at least one commute a week until the onset of BST.

I’m starting to think November is the new July.

* Lazy sod seems to be having a lie in. I’m going to get him a new watch.
** Those Badgers are nasty bastards. Lie in wait and then “mwwwaaaaah, eat the human“

Got a Wii?

On By AlexIn Other stuff2 Comments

You’ll be needing some of these then. Possibly. Before I share the web site with you – which is somewhat coy regarding the exact use of these rather suggestive items – it’s worth first explaining how I intend to use them.

We have a number of in-laws visiting very soon to celebrate the fact that most of their adult life, they’ve been married. Not sure that’s much to celebrate, and certainly at least one of them gives the impression of being more than adequately cheesed off about the whole thing. So to spice it up, I was thinking “Right then, who fancies a game on the WII, there you go Mr. W that’s one’s yours, Yes you can hold it like that if you’re feeling frisky and Mrs. W? Grab a load of that puppy”

Then “KIDS, OUT, NOW” and “Okay I’m loading the game now, on your marks, set….”

I think it’ll go well. Although possibly not end well. If I’ve spiked your interest, check them out here, and thanks to Samuri for finding them. The man’s a porn-hound 🙂

Rumination.

On By AlexIn Bikes, Mountain Bike Riding, Road Riding5 Comments

It’s quite a collection isn’t it? Of the eight bikes on that wall over half of them are mine. And while that’s a ratio tending to the static over the last few years, two things have recently changed. Firstly, I’ve singularly failed to add to the collection in over a year, and I’ve started to worry I may still have too many. Because at least three have become nothing more than wall art. Maybe I should frame my un-ridden frames.

The problem is somewhat mental but largely fiscal. A terrified peep from behind clasped hands worried out a figure barely short of six more – committed and mostly spent on this Dragons’ Horde of a house. I can only assume we have some fire breathing scaly pet in the cellar because – while there have been some big ticket items – It’s beyond my grasp to understand how we’ve spend so much.

Okay we’ve installed a satisfyingly fuck-off oak clad RSJ in one room, chased out every ground floor lintel and raised it four inches, ripped out the entire shell from the base of the house and re-stacked it with insulation, under floor heating and an oak floor so eye wateringly expensive I barely dare stand on it. And we’ve skipped a heating system based entirely on fire-bricks, and replaced it with a room full of stuff that converts cold to hot through a process of elven magic.

And yes, those elves run amok in 400 metres of garden buried pipes, atop of which a garden has crystallised from a car park and a couple of eneveloped drawings. Labour is a big part of this cost* because I am far too lazy/busy/useless to shovel/paint/nail – although the breathtaking scope creep of the bloke whose spent most of the last four months doing stuff I cannot begin to understand reminds me of being back at work. He came to build a dry stone wall for three days in June and has yet to leave.

Other men have drunk deeply at the bucket of of our disposable income fitting, grinding, plastering, wiring and painting. Which means we should be finished, right? Wrong, wander outside for a breath of fresh air and stand in a place where a porch may be, look through a 30 foot wall of shit windows that all need replacing and revel in half the garden barely retrieved from the triffids. And don’t get me started on upstairs. Mainly, because we haven’t either.

What has this to do with bikes then? Well my normal N+1* rationale suddenly feels profligate. Examine that photo and from the left we have the lovely, carefully restored Kona that’s been ridden twice since Christmas. Next to that is my happily deranged sidekick equipped with the shortest chainstays in the free world. I spent a lot of time throwing that off stuff but lately it’s just hung on the wall. Next up is the Cove and we’ll be back to that. Then Carol’s bike which I’d better not consider selling, tempting as it is.

Moving along, we’ve the fantastic Pace 405 a bike that needs more terrain, more commitment and more rider that I’ve been able to give it. Except possibly once. Then there is the faithful Jake, commuted like a demon, but rarely switched from tarmac to dirt.

Five bikes, and the only one that gets ridden a lot I want to swap for an ST4. Don’t ask for reasons, we’re way beyond that now. So I look, and I ponder and I think all I really need is a single MTB and a road bike. Something that is everything I am not, honed, fast and light and mostly carbon. Sell the rest, to hell with a second hand market which pays nothing for emotional value, go minimalist. Ride what you have, don’t leave it on the wall.

But, but, but one MTB isn’t enough. And if you’re going to have a spare, make it a good one. And that DMR has given me so much for so little, why sell it for buttons? And the Kona MTB is brilliant really, an icon, an anchor on what’s important about riding. But I still need an ST4 and one of these which has somewhat holed my rationalisation plan below the waterline.

I might sell the cross bike although even that feels like a betrayal, but it’ll free up a space on the bike wall for 18lbs of Carbon Ego Boost. And then, if that doesn’t feel too bad maybe the Kona. Or the DMR. Not the Pace though, that’d just be wrong. And even if the ST4 is as brilliant as I remember, I can’t get rid of the Cove.

So N+1 just became N+2. That’s not rationalisation, that’s bloody madness.

* Not the One Eyed Wonder’s Labour who merely find ever more innovative ways to cock stuff up on our behalf.

** Where “N” is the current number of bicycles owned.

That night ride was brought to you by…

On By AlexIn Bikes, Mountain Bike RidingLeave a comment

…

  • Zero visibility fog
  • Amusingly intermittent LED lights
  • Leaking Camelbaks
  • Cheeky rain showers
  • Tractionless wet leaves
  • Occasional mud, always in a place most likely to cause an accident
  • Bruised testicles
  • Vertical exposure

This rider would like to thank

  • The bloke who designed Avid Juicy disc brakes
  • New Zealand Merino Wool
  • Kenda Tyres
  • Giro Helmets
  • GroundEffect toasty socks
  • Endura waterproof shorts
  • Shimano boots

without which I’d be communicating from a hospital bed.

That was a PROPER night ride 🙂

Embrace the mudness.

On By AlexIn Bikes, Mountain Bike RidingLeave a comment

Last week, at about this time, I looked out of the window and spiteful, freezing rain glared right back at me. So I ventured outside to check whether rain’s winter* twins were physically in evidence. Indeed they were, a biting cold wind under a thunderous sky clamping the world in grey and misery.

Perfect conditions for riding a mountain bike at night then. And if you read last months Singletrack magazine**, articles abound on the joy of slogging through two seasons of mud, grit and grimness. Now we all know that such writings pour forth from the deluded, the medicated or the untruthful, and yet I find their tone worrying in that it fails to resonate at all.

You see maybe I’ve stopped being a Mountain Biker. Oh I still ride quite a lot, on different bikes in different places with different people. And yet, I enjoy being out with the kids for an hour on some play dirt, as much as I do humping up hills and scaring myself shitless going down. Maybe “recreational cyclist” is a more appropriate moniker.

That’s not good, and neither is my attitude to night riding at the best of times. Those times being mid summer, zero chance of benightment, short sleeved tops, comedy tan marks and trails of dusty grip. Even then, shifting my arse and mental state from ‘sofa‘ to ‘saddle‘ takes way more effort that it should when you consider how 99 times out of a 100, I love being out there.

My new tactic is not to go home at all. Ignore the distractions of family, warm rooms, hot food and a million things on the to-do list. Throw the bike in the car, and throw myself into a days work that’ll demand unwinding through a thousand pedal revolutions. But more than that, stop thinking it’s cold, and shit, and horrible and instead revel is the silliness of slippy trails, the joy of solace in normally crowded hills, the big deposit in the summer karma bank – all of that and all of the other stuff you can neither define or explain but makes up a big piece of the “why we do this” pie.

A difficult day morphed into a traffic stained drive home leaving me far too stressed for the gentle ribbing of my riding pals. But within the first hundred yards of splashy spinning, all that was behind and only things marked fun lay ahead. I felt good – and the older you get, the more random this seems regardless of any perceived levels of fitness and vim – and it was great to settle into the comfy armchair cadence of of the like-minded.

Better still, we bypassed the first 600 foot climb which leaves me breathless and broken every time. It’s a horror, and I wasn’t sorry to feel the shadowy presence of the big hill brood over our valley borne souls. We still put in a good shift at the climbing face though, and it was nearly thirty minutes before we commanded a high point overlooking twinkling lights of the towns and city below.

I’ve always loved this bit. Imagining the hundreds, thousands of people down there washing up, watching television, getting old by proxy and living little lives that didn’t explode a couple of times a week when mixed with mountain biking. I know this is a shallow and naive view of the world, but it warmed me as that cold wind howled over the tops. Time to go. Better still time to go downhill.

A descent through an old grassed earthen-work ditch is the only place in my riding world where two wheel drifts don’t lead directly to Accident and Emergency. A hasty discussion when we’d stopped giggling sent us onward – deep into the Malverns to ominous heights. Black Hill, Perseverance and Hangman’s point all connected with zig zagging paths and windy summits.

Below the three line, it was warm, pleasant even, to grind up the few hundred feet lost after we’d cheek’d our way down some alpine like swtichbacks. On top, the wind drove us on and back towards home taking in a descent that is so steep and so fast I’ve watched my life pass behind my eyes many, many times. Nowadays I displace the terror of the speed and the hiss of loose gravel under wheel by fast forwarding past the dull bits.

More climbing – there is so much here in such short distances. Every mile you ride, expect to climb 200-250 feet, but my legs and lungs had taken their cue from Mr. Positive Thinking up top. Which made the plunge back through steep woods with a couple of dicey chutes to finish seem more than a fair return for endless pedalling.

In fact, I was up for more up, a climb back up the bastard face of “MidSummer” to access a trail full of steep off-camber, slimy, frictionless roots pre-worried by a little drop that’s had me close to visiting endo-city for about, oh, the last year and a bit. But I was mad keen, or maybe just mad as my normal contribution to this part of the ride is a whining request for flatlander status.

But we called it a night, and also called it a damn good ride. The bikes needed a little hosing, I needed about the same when I got home, but I felt like a proper mountain biker again. And as I look outside, if anything it’s even worse right now meaning more slippy trails, more cold, more out in the grim conditions for tonight’s ride. You know what?

I can’t wait 🙂

* I know it’s not winter officially yet, but according to my internal barometer, it’s bloody freezing out there.

** Which, since I’m in it, is worth the cover price alone 🙂

Sunshine and Showers.

On By AlexIn Other stuff2 Comments

Not a terribly adventurous weather forecast for this time of year is it? A squillion pounds worth of powerful supercomputers running multi-threaded modelling software all expertly analysed by blokes with beards and yet this is the best they can come up with? So I’ve challenged myself to do better, and in no way felt hampered by having nothing more than a window, a rainfall measuring device* and many years of weather lore ingrained by being continually pissed on while commuting.

But I thought it was important to start small** and look for a niche opportunity to sell this fresh new meteorological service. So I bring to you “The Indoor Forecast” – now I accept the market is potentially only two children with no money of their own, a woman who has none of my obsession for stuff I can’t change and a dog, who while looking interested and keen, views weather as something that aids running, eating sheep shit and rolling in fox poo.

On the upside, it does give me an ideal opportunity to stop the kids’ pocket money and raid their bank accounts. The next obvious question would be “Exactly how hard is it to forecast indoor weather“. Well quite bloody hard actually Mr. Clever Trousers, especially when your heating system is essentially a NASA space shuttle only with more complexity and potential for catastrophic explosions.

We had great plans for our utility room, all scuppered by the installation of a Scud Missile masquerading as two hot water cylinders and a Swedish Heat Pump that has more than the odd blond moment. There is no room for anything other than shock and awe with the sheer quantity of stuff connecting the two. We have the output of 400 metres of under garden pipe at one end, multiple snakes of hot and cold water conduits disappearing through various apertures, electrical systems strung between the two and pumps, so many pumps pushing liquid this way and that. It is exactly like a 70s film set where the cat-stroking bad guy cackles”Ah Mr. Bond, marvel at my Destroy The World machine and see now that I cannot be beaten mwaaaahhhh”

So the bottom of the house is heated by underfloor heating, the top by big radiators, the bathrooms by huge steel towel rails all working off different circuits and powered by different, er, stuff. The hot water is another physics lesson in itself, and I’ve taken to wondering aloud if it is all really just magic, with careful examination of the darker spaces bringing elves and other magic creatures into the light.

“What has all this to do with indoor weather?” you demand. Well just this; on Monday evening, the local forecast at 21:45 hours was for a cool front passing through the kitchen (dog outside, door open), a warm channel of air being forced between two channels of high pressure (sure you can work that out), cloudy upstairs (steaming bath) and extremely wet on two walls where once there had been just dry plaster and fresh paintwork.

The outlook was not good at all. The threat of localised flooding was a real possibility, as were lighting strikes from frying electrics and definite impediments to travel unless one was packing an inflatable. At times like this, it’s important your first response gets right to the heart of the problem. Knowing this, and not much else I shouted to Carol “Probably worth knowing someting has exploded upstairs and we’ve Vietnamese boat people docking at our TV“. She instantly diagnosed the problem and dispatched me to Mission Control to shut down all systems.

Again, not as easy as it sounds. It goes like this; run into utility room and be faced with a barrage of flanges, wheels and valves, flashing me back to WWII films where the plucky brit single handedly attempts to put out a massive fire in a submarine engine room. In such films, rarely does the hero dash back into the kitchen for a chair much needed to ascend the North Face of the Scud. A riot of grunting, flipping and punching eventually created a tense quiet on the Western Front. The cascade was reduced to a dribble, which descrives well my soggy mental conditon as well.

The advent of a proper plumber brought guiltily forth a faulty “sealed for life“*** component that had decided it would rather be a hose than a pipe. We’re still awash in the sea of damp carpet, mouldering plaster and soggy floor, but had it happened an hour later, the forecast would have told of the kind of disaster that unstoppable hot water at mains pressure would create.

I am considering though a return to wood fires and tin baths. Or getting some new elves in. Elf and Safety you see – they just don’t go together. The forecast for the rest of the week is turning increasingly grumpy, with large clouds of depression and some internal wine showers at regular intervals.

* Bucket
* And work down.
*** Maybe of a mayfly. Lasted a total of four days.

Shh, it’s a secret.

On By AlexIn Other stuff3 Comments

I have just signed the Official Secrets Act* and frankly that’s a worry. Firstly, because even the most cursory examination of my past will not only uncover skeletons in the closet, it’ll will also cast a embarrassing light on why most of them have four legs. And the general proportions of a goat.

What is equally perturbing is exactly how difficult it is to complete the form. Not because it is particularly complicated, more the almost endless repetition of name, address and date of birth. I started to think this was all part of the test, and the spooks were trying to catch you out by asking the same question in many different places. And I’m not sure I will pass – because completing it on the wobbly train this morning has hieroglyphed my entry into a code as complex as Enigma.

This isn’t the end of it either. I have been summoned to present myself to the security controller who shall doubtless be an ex-military type with waxed mustache and pefecftly shined shoes**. I fully expect to be given a dressing down on multiple points including poor handwriting, form completion outside the designated boxes and a lack of mirror presentation of the corporate brogue. I’ll be lucky if I’m able to run away before being shot.

If this invasion of my shady past wasn’t bad enough, I now find a second once-mighty-oak has almost broken my desk with it’s heft and girth. I don’t even know the answers to some of the questions on this 22 page form (with a similar sized document providing “guidance”) and it’s doubtful I’ll escape without the big rejected stamp and a citation for Lack of Moral Fibre.

It is mildy diverting to find all the forms must be completed by hand. There is absolutely no joined up process by which your details can flow between documents. So far I’ve been forced to remember how old I am a staggering eleven times. It does make you wonder exactly how efficient our Home Office is because you just know all this stuff gets re-keyed into five different systems, while the originals filed in some huge, dusty basement.

Is it any surprise that government officials lose secret documents on an almost daily basis? I mean there are so many copies in so many different formats, Why don’t we just open the doors to MI5 and invite everyone in for a look-see. And then we could interogate them or torture them or lock ’em in the basement along with my capacious files.

Still I’ll be alright. Because I know stuff now that I can’t tell you about. And no, it doesnt have anything to do with that goat, the tub of whipped cream and the spontaneous combustion of terrified ungulates.

* Has anyone signed the unofficial secret act? What’s in there then “Yeah try not to sleep with Russian Spies if you’ve a briefcase full of secret stuff, y’know?”

** And that’s just the women.

I do not love the smell of wet plaster in the morning.

On By AlexIn Other stuffLeave a comment

Last night our swanky new heating system suffered the kind of failure that can easily remodel your house, replacing solids with liquids. Assuming the crisis does pass, I will explain how three minutes of my life were exercised in rotating big wheels, flipping switches and winding flange levers. To ask if our heating system is a bit complex is akin to wondering whether Tesco is a tad busy the night before Christmas.

However, until then let me share with you some fine satire on the world of modern life and corporate speak. I’m sure you’ve probably seen it before, but it cheered me up this morning. And I really did need cheering up.

*TESTICULATING.
Waving your arms around and talking bollocks.

*BLAMESTORMING.
Sitting round in a group, discussing why a deadline was missed or a project failed, and who was responsible.

*SEAGULL MANAGER.
A manager, who flies in, makes a lot of noise, craps on everything and everyone and then leaves.

*ASSMOSIS.
The process by which people seem to absorb success and advancement by sucking up to the boss rather than working hard.

*SALMON DAY.
The experience of spending an entire day swimming upstream only to get screwed .

*CUBE FARM.
An office filled with cubicles.

*PRAIRIE DOGGING.
When someone yells or drops something loudly in a cube farm, and people’s heads pop up over the walls to see what’s going on. (This also applies to applause for a promotion because there may be cake.)

*SITCOMs.
Single Income, Two Children, And Oppressive Mortgage. What yuppies turn into when they have children and one of them stops working to stay home with the kids or start a ‘home business’.

*SINBAD.
Single working girls. Single income, no boyfriend and desperate.

*AEROPLANE BLONDE.
One who has bleached/dyed her hair but still has a ‘black box’.

* PERCUSSIVE MAINTENANCE.
The fine art of whacking the crap out of an electronic device to get it to work again.

*ADMINISPHERE.
The rarefied organisational layers beginning just above the rank and file. Decisions that fall from the ‘adminisphere’ are often profoundly inappropriate or irrelevant to the problems they were designed to solve. This is often affiliated with the dreaded ‘administrivia’ – needless paperwork and processes.

* 404.
Someone who’s clueless. From the World Wide Web error message ‘404 not found’ meaning that the requested document could not be located.

*OH – NO SECOND.
That minuscule fraction of time in which you realize that you’ve just made a BIG mistake (e.g. you’ve hit ‘reply all’).

*JOHNNY-NO-STARS.
A young man of substandard intelligence, the typical adolescent who works in a burger restaurant. The ‘no-stars’ comes from the badges displaying stars that staff at fast-food restaurants often wears to show their level of training.

*GOING FOR A McSHIT.
Entering a fast food restaurant with no intention of buying food, you’re just going to the bog. (Loo) If challenged by a pimply staff member, your declaration to them that you’ll buy their food afterwards is known as a McShit with Lies.

*MILLENNIUM DOMES.
The contents of a wonder bra, i.e. extremely impressive when viewed from the outside, but there’s actually naught in there worth seeing.

*GREYHOUND.
A very short skirt only an inch from the hare.

* SALAD DODGER.
An excellent phrase for an overweight person.

* SWAMP-DONKEY
A deeply unattractive person.

* MONKEY BATH.
A bath so hot, that when lowering yourself in, you go: ‘Oo! Oo! Oo! Aa! Aa! Aa!’.

* MYSTERY BUS.
The bus that arrives at the pub on Friday night while you’re in the toilet after your 10th pint, and whisks away all the unattractive people so the pub is suddenly packed with stunners when you come back in.

* BREAKING THE SEAL.
Your first pee in the pub, usually after 2 hours of drinking. After breaking the seal of your bladder, repeat visits to the toilet will be required every 10 or 15 minutes for the rest of the night.

* TART FUEL.
Bottled premixed spirits, regularly consumed by young women.

* PICASSO BUM.
A woman whose knickers are too small for her, so she looks like she’s got 4 buttocks.

Stolen brazenly from Julian who is old mate and recent hedgehogger.

The future’s bright, the future is…

On By AlexIn Other stuff, PhotographyLeave a comment

It flies! Retro colours, rubbish pilot

.. orange-ish. Had you going there eh? Thought I had bought a new bike. No, that particular item has not even reached the debating table, and the assertion that “it is easier to apologise than ask permission” is somewhat tempered by the potential loss of testicle to the rolling pin of fiscal stimulation.

Make of that what you will. Anyway another glider has been committed to aviation which is not as mundane as you may think. Because I* built it, covered it, plugged it full of electronics and even flew it on its’ first – and nearly last – flight.

The plunge into the valley below was, this time, not a direct consequence of my stick twiddling skills. No, the major factor was launching into a autumnal abyss not troubled by any actual wind. Cutting out the technical stuff, gliders without wind are generally slightly aerodynamic bricks soon to become many, many unrecognisable shards of splintered wood.

To my amazement I managed to land** some 15 metres below my feet in some handy bracken. Subsequent attempts at flying above the ridge have been mainly successful and, so far, I’ve returned home with the same number of pieces as I started with. In the same shape. This is pretty contrary to my flying career so far. Probably just got lucky.

Every time I stand on the slope, I think “I really should be riding my bike”. I have been riding, but it’s not exactly a priority for my spare time. Saturday we had a proper MTB ride in the woods with the kids, except they had a great time sliding between trees, and I less so chasing them on Shanks’ pony, much encumbered by tyre-chewing mutt.

I think the solution would be a new bike. And possibly a novelty testicle.

* Except for the difficult bits. Carol did those. Natch 😉

** Verb used in the context of “was available for re-use” rather than anything you’ve experienced in a proper aircraft.

Not My World

On By AlexIn Other stuff1 Comment

NWM(hm)* encompasses that every increasing slice of life’s pie chart entitled “what the fuck?“. This vast swathe of nonsense starts at politicians, ends at people who confuse wealth with entitlement and pinpoints swaggery, arrogance, stupidity and downright lunacy at all points in between.

It’s quite a big slice. Give us representative examples I hear you ask. How long have you got I would reply except I have a real corker burning hot right here, right now. I’ve been extremely fortunate this year spending only a few days away from home thereby avoiding the cockmunchery of business class, business dinners and business hotels all wrapped in self importance and toe curling obsequiousness.

Last week that my world stopped while this started. One night in our dirty Capital starting out well with too many beers with too few old friends**, and ended meandering in a slightly inebriated peramble back to a new hotel shadowed by the magnificence of St. Pauls.

A nice man with a top hat and eastern European accent clearly felt I was in not state to operate a door and wafted me into reception. Where three more of a similar geographic landscape fell upon me and my luggage offering all sorts of services and smiles, somewhere in the middle of which might have been a room for the night.

Dignity is something I’ve long been separated from. And I have some history here both in a deficient self control gland and a hatred for contemporary hotels. But even with all that and headful of rubbish beer, I still delivered sufficient upright bearing to refuse assistance in carrying a very small bag and a very tired body up a single flight of stairs.

Nodding vigorously at the retention of my working class credentials, I dodged two more hotel-borg on the extended stroll to my room – the hotel being quite large and me failing to decipher the oh-so-arty hieroglyphics masquerading as room numbers. A lucky break and a repeated key stabbing action gained me access to a space both clearly brand new and evidently decorated by a man who was so NWM he probably arrived in a designer spaceship.

Of the many terrors this “hybrid third place delivering joy on many different soul levels” holds for the common man, the second most scary was represented by the bed. Or more precisely what was on the bed – to whit 12 cushions. And there were two beds . TWENTY-FUCKING-FOUR cushions? What is going on here? Clearly some kind of haberdashery arms race between competing hotels “Yes Gervase, they may have tassles spun from the testicle fur of a Arabian camel ,but who has covered the entire room with 70s wallpaper stuffed with foam? Hmm Hmm?”

Unless you are a giraffe such plump accouterments are nothing more than pointless garnish, which may go some way to explaining how only 11 pence remained for the lighting system. Some not very bright spark configured the many and varied side lights, over hanging bulbs, desk illuminations and searing mirror lights in such a way they could only be extinguished by a master switch by the door.

I’ll let you think about that while I stumble about in a doomed navigational voyage to the bed. I successfully avoided various modern edgy edges before being felled by one of the very cushions I’d tossed to the floor some minutes earlier. Only mildly winded and lightly bruised, I climbed into bed where it became apparent no expense had been spared on the heating system either.

No because they’d captured a small sun and installed it directly under my room. Three more fraught journeys to the air conditioning panel*** made little difference other than adding to the all body bruising. Eventually I gave up, adding a duvet sail to the sea of pointless cushions and spent the next six hours not sleeping much.

The alarm call had all the charm that an electronic beep can offer before being followed up by one of the reception zombies enquiring if I required anything else? A proper night’s sleep? A room that’s not heated by the earth’s core? A lighting system not designed by the bloke from the Crystal Maze? “I’ll send up a suggestion card shall I sir?”

So hungover, tired and hungry I felt my day could only improve by a nice relaxing shower. Obviously, being me, I could never get that fucking lucky. The whole bathroom was a riot of light, mirrors, angles and everything carefully designed to make a fragile head feel slightly worse. But this merely was a curtain raiser for the shower; what a statement this was – huge tiled area, multiple outlets, mirrored casings and three shiny, chromed knobs with absolutely no notation on them whatsoever.

Being a proper engineer, I twiddled with the knobs**** for a while before an ill advised full bore rotation of a random knob fired out water at a pressure speaking directly of a conduit mined to the Mariana trench. Cold water at that, although cold isn’t really a good describing word as my kids would say. They probably wouldn’t say “FUUUUUCKKKK SHIIIIT WHAT THE TWATING HELL IS GOING ON HERE?” because they’d have been too busy drowning.

The sheer volume of icy liquid left me with no option but to salmon swim back up the cubicle in order to beat the stupid controls with a bloody fist. Finally I achieved some kind of water karma, but frankly I’d rather have fallen into the Thames than spend one bloody minute in that hotel. On checking out, many shiny teeth asked me if I’d enjoyed my brief stay.

And because I’m English I said “Yes, it was lovely” and “Do you have a doctor on site because I think I may have broken your shower with my testicles. Terribly sorry“.

And yet, and yet London is a hard place to hate on an autumnal morning draped in blue sky under a warming yellow sun. I popped into St. Pauls and wished the hotel designers had spent one minute in here because – even to a dedicated atheist such as me – it has an undoubted presence and almost endless beauty. And on my short walk to the office, I ducked off the main drag and wandered happily through narrow streets peopled with every size, shape and colour you could every want to meet.

I like that. And I liked the boggling choice of places for a NWM man to get a breakfast that doesn’t cost twenty five quid and come with worryingly attentive waiters. I chose one at random, ordered up pig inna bun accompanied by a vat of tea and all was well with the world.

Until the bill came and with it a demand for the best part of ten pounds.

Not My World. Not even close.

* Hedgehog Mark. Like a trademark only spikier.

** Up to the point when I – un-Yorkshirelike – I got a round in. How much for a beer? At least serve it bloody warm.

*** I considered ringing reception for some string but could not face the bright smiles of 300 or so employees turning up at my door.

**** Which kept me entertained for a while but realistically wasn’t going to get me clean and corporate.