Tag: Stupidity

“There’s a problem with your bike”

On By AlexIn Bikes, Road Riding9 Comments

So said the standard issue multi pierced, alternatively hairstyled young punk behind the Bikehut desk. I was only able to extract this admission once he’d had a good scratch of his crotch, and spent some time examining the floor in the obvious hope this would spare him from dealing with boring old blokes. To be fair to the lad, it cannot be easy even moving about when your jeans have a crotch that doubles as a marsupial pouch, and even just bending down risks several potentially lethal stabs from a much-gelled serrated fringe.

It’ll take a while for you to scroll down when I’ll get this down, but stick with me on this, it’s a cracker.

AL: “Right then, tell me more what’s the problem”

GR: “Gears won’t index, need a spacer, don’t have the tool, can’t let you have it without PDI’ing it fully otherwise they’ll make me wear proper clothes“*

AL: “Well you could have called me” GR: “We lost your number” AL Slapping Every Increasing Forehead “When will it be ready then?”

GR: “Tomorrow, maybe Friday, no later than when you’re dead”

AL: “I know this isn’t your fault, and you’ve been left to roll out the bad news by your boss who sounds the part but clearly has a fine career waiting only in Sales and Marketing, but I’m here now, I’m a bit irritated, I have no intention of coming back tomorrow, so what do you suggest we do next?”

GR clearly considering which bike tool he’s going to insert up his boss’s back passage come first light tomorrow “Er, Er, I dunno, do you want a black one?“**

AL: “No I bloody don’t. I’m in touch with my inner Essex, what’s Plan C?”

Plan C appears to be the supervisor who is – oh – months older than the Grom, who smartly steps in and asks “Large is it?” “Yep” ” Special Edition” “Yep”, “How about that one over there?” She points to a bike carelessly laid on the clothing rack showing at least the odd sign of being built.

GR: “Er, Er, that’s for a bloke whose coming in tonight. From Swindon”

SU: “Ring him up, tell him not to bother”

GR: “Don’t have his number either”

SU: “He’d have come by now, let this gentleman have it”

GR and I exchange a glance. I know he’s in a world of shit if this bloke turns up demanding his bike tonight even though it’s only 20 minutes to closing, and he knows I’m clearly the type of selfish arse that is leaving with either the bike of his choice, or a choice of body part from the cannon fodder behind the desk.

GR: “I’ll just sort the brake cables” and off he wanders hunting for some tool that is clearly going to be sharper than his own intellect.

For a second, I’m conflicted with a fairly unusual feeling of guilt that not only does some poor bastard have to live in Swindon, he’s made a special trip all the way to Hereford where his reward will be a grunty grommit and a bag full of excuses. Two seconds later, I’m over it and flashing virtual cash while trying to speed up the lad whose turning cable cutting into a three week job.

Eventually – just before I rip the tool from his hand and do it myself because I know something bad is bound to happen if this goes on much longer – the bike is handed over, I take a deep breath and admonish myself not to ruin everything by hastily falling down the stairs. I navigate those successfully only to be confronted by a fit looking chap of about my height sharing a cheeky hello and a “Snap I’ve come to pick one of those up”.

Well what would you do? Honestly, you’d be out that shop and gunning the engine in an escape driver styleee rather than have to try and negotiate between three people you’ll never see again, or be forced to wrestle for ownership of the one working bicycle. Look I’m not proud of my behaviour, but at least I’m being honest here. And he was from Swindon, so really deserves almost everything he can get. Or is this case, didn’t.

Bike loaded, engine running, I sneaked a last look up the stairs when there seemed to be some kind of argument going on. I’m surprised they didn’t call me up to ask if I could come back in – ah no they’d lost my phone number of course. I’ll ring up tomorrow to make sure no-one was injured on my behalf, but right now I’ve a lovely 8 kilogram Carbon road bike sat behind me ready to float onto the ceiling and that’s makes me happy.

And a bit of a bastard, yes I’ll admit to that.

* I have applied the Babel-Hog to save you having to navigate grunts, oddly placed glottal stops and vigorous crouch rubbing.

** Again, I’d like our London readers to take a deep breath and try not to make 2+2 add up to about 69.

“I hate computers”

On By AlexIn Other stuff4 Comments

Not me specifically, I’m more nuanced than that. I’d rather focus my attention on bloaty applications that attempt to ruin my day – spookily all developed by Microsoft.

I am however pretty familiar with the much trotted “Computers are Rubbish” line generally accompanied by a bunch of inventive lies we used to file under the rather superb PEBKAC (Problem Exists Between Keyboard And Chair) acronym, but I’ve never really understood it.

How can you hate computers? Do you loathe your car, your TV, your phone* or your microwave? Do you haughtily reject the lives saved by computer technology, the democratic power unleashed by the Internet**, the technical endeavour to put a man on the moon or encircle the globe single handed on a boat, or just stripping out repetitive drudgery and – quite important this – giving me a indoor job for all my working life.

People don’t hate computers, they hate being shackled to the Neon Tube, stuck in a electronic rut of a daily grind, dealing with the shit they need to do all buried under some User Interface that can’t read your mind or talk back. Frankly,they should be grateful for people like me that lived in the geeky world before computers became mainstream. We properly suffered; nothing worked very often and when it did it was almost entirely useless and mostly incomprehensible, and essentially we’d have been better off with a pad and few crayons***

But even we pioneers are now on the wrong side Digital divide. Computer technology is embedded to everyone under 30 and they embrace it, love it and mostly don’t even notice it. I watch my kids mash chunks of disparate technology into something ace, understandingly little other than it really is child’s play to them. Which is what they still are and yet technology allows them to be adult, whereas us proper gray people cling onto desperate skills such as being able to type. Like that’s going to help. The world is seemingly increasingly divided into those who live their lives immersed in technology, comfortable in it’s embrace and not at all worried where it might lead go, and everyone else who wonders if this all started when we couldn’t programme the video recorder.

Anyway let’s hope they are right because otherwise that’s our pensions screwed. Actually my division should fade to grey, because my technology savvy is pretty much akin to riding a bike. I know enough to be dangerous and occasionally credible, but I certainly don’t hate everything which defies my 42 year old understanding. Those who wish to be digital hermits really have got it wrong. And worse than that it’s hypocrisy crossed with nostalgia for a better, simpler world that never really existed. They are the poster children of Luddites- smashing the machinery of the industrial revolution while wearing the very stuff ratcheting cheaply off a million power looms.

And even that misses the point. There is this odd perception that humankind is getting more intelligent with every generation and yet this is clearly not the case. More enlightened possibly? I’m not sure about that either. But technology is getting very clever and – here’s the thing – cleverer than us. To hate computers is as pointless as hating rain, we’re powerless to stop the march of technology – we may as well chuck a snowball into an avalanche.

If you are going to the trouble of hating something, make it a worthwhile cause, the BNP, poachers killing the last tigers, world leaders cravenly burning the environment on the altar of developing nations. Humans – yeah we deserve it, but computers are pretty bloody blameless.

* During the 80s pre-pc bunfight, we had a Betamax moment where a great bit of hardware going by the name of the Acorn Atom failed to take the market by storm through a depressing combination of shit logistics, crap marketing and some ginger fuck selling ZX Spectrum’s. There is a direct line from that chipset to the stuff that runs virtually every mobile phone. Not many people know that. Understandable really, as it’s not very interesting

** And not forgetting the no.1 app on that. People used to think there was no money in Porn. How the world has changed.

*** I concede this many be analogous to the “Vista Experience”

Second Life

On By AlexIn Other stuff2 Comments

I’ve said before that anyone playing Second Life was quite obviously lacking a first one. And so surprised I wasn’t to read that the Internet generation has vigorously waved a virtual “V” at Lindon Labs’ cyber-asylum. With the attention span of the Internet generation being similar to that of an attention deficit goldfish, it’s hardly an real-earth(tm) shattering news story that they’ve moved on.

Because that’s what they do, from Texting to Twitter, from email to MSN to Facebook. From deskbound personal computers, to funky laptops, to netbooks to iPhones and then hopefully miniaturising themselves up their own arse. The cool cats* twit and book between free application spaces distributing random content and demanding immediacy. They don’t need a second world to inhabit because they’re already trying to exist in too many of their own lives. Once it stopped being about forging long term cyber relationships through the bloody hard work of being something your not, and switched to broadcast channels where people you’ve never met are apparently interested that you’ve shit blue poo, Second Life was looking like a life support case.

But what is BRILLIANT is the way the not-so-cool-cats hang on to stridently tell those who’ve already left what they are missing. Allow me to quote a couple:

“have a reason to go there – like real life, Second Life is not Facebook, which is simply about keeping in touch with people in your network. I was lost at first, but quickly found new friends and new things to do. I help run a travelling vaudeville theatre group and write & perform comedy acts – something I’d never have thought of doing in real life.”

Oh do fuck off, please. You don’t help run a theatre group you deluded idiot. Nor do you “perform” unless that includes a toe suckingly cringy electronically generated parp broadcasted to a bunch of saddos eating pizza off their underwear. Here’s another:

“I do not consider myself to be a weirdo and I am certainly not looking for cheap thrills or an extra-marital affair”

Two things here: A) you’re a weirdo, ask anyone but yourself and b) you wrote that in case your wife read that. Or maybe you are one and only person whose not looking for CyberWank+. A good thing because if you ever meet the honed sword throwing latex clad godess in real life, she’s a 19 stone trucker from Northampton with a broadband connection, and a hard spot for pretty boys.

There’s even a bloke quoting the Gartner Hype Life Cycle which has sadly intersected with my working life a few times. I never really got the Slope of Englightenment as it always faces upwards, and any cyclists knows this to be a bad thing. Anyway he’s missing the point by a few million miles, because once the mainstream and the corporates have moved on, only the weirdos remain. And they may have many attributes including stapling cats to their ears, but hard cash is not one of them.

So while Second Life may now be yesterdays’ news, still millions flock to on line cyberworlds, notably if they involve stupid quests and edged weapons. “Sorry dear, I can’t come and talk to the kids, as IT’S REALLY IMPORTANT that right now nine of us are storming fuck-buckles castle, and I’m lead Orc in the fight against WhaleJaw the Mighty and his army of terrifying stoats“. You need to play that back. Probably at the divorce court.

And just in case anyone tries a counterpoint to my derision by pointing out that writing this blog is an escapist broadcast channel, then let me tell you this: I am sane enough to know exactly what it is. “Broadcast Channel?” I think not – load of old shit I enjoy writing way more than I expect you enjoy reading. And I don’t want to have sex with any of you either. I’m sure the feeling is mutual 😉

* That is definitely not me. It’s probably not you either.

SNAP

On By AlexIn Other stuff3 Comments

I need to file and Health and Safety report from my trip this morning.

Location: Quiet Carriage located on a train travelling between Hereford and London
Time: 07:47

Situation: Two vacuous women of Black Country descent have spent the last 90 minutes variously discussing shoes, useless employees, how clever their children are, and are now debating the finer points of when it’s okay to lose your knickers in public.

Event: Kindly gent with upright aristocratic bearing seated opposite was riled beyond breaking point. Being English nothing more than raised eyebrows, almost imperceptible shaking of a well groomed head and the odd angry rustling of The Times had so far signalled his displeasure.

I think it was the knickers. A man of a certain age and standing probably has a genetic trigger that cannot be stayed when dippy women gush in not very hushed whispers, and indulge in verbal water torture. It’s been a while since I’ve seen someone mentally explode, so it’s worth reporting the full conversation.

Kindly Gent: “Madam, would you mind please keeping silent, as you have obviously failed to notice this is the quiet carriage. And you are not”
Vacuous Brummie: “Oooooh well it says Quiet, not silent and we’re speaking very quietly and I don’t think we’re disturbing anyone”
(30 papers shake vigorously signalling the communal rustle of disagreement with that last statement)
KG: “Madam, you are. And you have been for over an hour”
VB: “Well I don’t know. You should have mentioned it earlier”
KG: “I was hoping I wouldn’t have too”
(Beginners mistake here, those of us who live in the real world know that manners and politeness rarely break out on this train. That’s why I won’t sit in the cock’s carriage which does allow mobile phones and ego to ply their nefarious trade)
VB: “Well I suppose we can try and be a bit quieter”
KG: “Or you could move to another carriage where I’m sure others would enjoy your conversations as much as I haven’t”
(not sure I got this quite right, but it was an rapier thin insult that punctured the air of the tense calm so far enveloping this conversation. Sharp intakes of breaths and supportive “Yes, Get in there” from the non-bloody-annoying side of the carriage)
VB: “Well there is no need to be insulting”
(Oh I dunno, I think there is more than just cause but KG ignored the comment)
KG: “I hope I have got my point across, really your crass behaviour is totally unacceptable”

And then before the Midlands Super-Gob could respond or strike him down with her terrifying pointy handbag, he stood up, modestly acknowledged the almost silent – yet heartfelt – thanks from all of us, and de-trained* at Reading.

Leaving us with that kind of shocked silence that is gradually filled by people needing to examine some papers very closely and for a long time STARTING RIGHT NOW.

We’ve been here before. Thankfully it wasn’t me today. I was very, very tempted but had inadvertantly left the Heavy Shovel Of Righteousness at home. And obviously, if we’d been in America, someone would have been shot. Ying and Yang, struggling to see the downside of that one.

* Scorpion Pit Alert. Find the man who felt the urge to add this to the Train Manager’s script. Assume he’s the same bloke who talks about us being “re-platformed”. Dunno what this is, but sounds painful.

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.

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.

No Shit Sherlock.

On By AlexIn Other stuff2 Comments

I should have ridden in today for many reasons. One of them being I would not have been forced to suffer the unending tripe of breakfast radio shows. Hunting around my normal Radio 4 frequency – having had my fill or terrorists and public service cuts – BBC Hereford and Worcester promised much in terms of mindless music and pointless chat to speed me through the early morning traffic.

But it couldn’t even manage that. The dopey presenter regaled the torpid (it was v. early) listener with a story of how teachers had identified the “naughtiest children by their names“. On reading this list, I was struck by a number of blindingly obvious facts, and one major concern.

1) All the naughty kids read out spookily correlated with the most popular children’s names since the year 2000. One could persuasively argue that the probability of a child called “Jack” being a bit cheeky has a slightly higher statistical possibility than one named Murgatroid.

2) I thought teachers were busy. Why would you spend one second creating this list? It’s not only very bad mathematics for a educational establishment, it’s probably also got paranoid parents flooding the deed pole help line.

3) How the hell have Brooklyn, Dwayne and Jade crept into the top 10 most popular names?

I know this stuff shouldn’t bother me. I appreciate that intellectual rigour has been superseded by look-at-me statistics and poor science, but surely even dead air is better than spouting such bloody nonsense?

On my return trip, my listening experience will be the aurial delight of road noise.

Commuting rules..

On By AlexIn Bikes, Road RidingLeave a comment

.. not when it’s raining it doesn’t. Nor am I postulating on the stuff that used to keep me exercised both mentally and physically. What I’m talking about here are the hard, inflexible rules hammered into any cyclist whose spent time on the road and in the rain. The kind of thing you get wrong just once, before it’s hard-wired into your cycling psyche.

Except when your daily commute becomes a weekly or bi monthly event. Then you forget and bad stuff happens.

It gets dark. Check your lights. Long day, shorter daylight demands some form of get-me-home illumination. Of the four lights generally festering in my bag, two didn’t work at all, one flashed briefly before a spectacular – if brief – fizzling death while the fourth offered a dim flashing facsimile of something that may prevent a tractor squashing you flat.

Carry spares of everything. Including batteries. It’s worth thinking of them as fitness ballast to cushion the disappointment of these also being flat. The day I removed one of my two spare tubes, guess how many punctures I ended up with? My MP3 player was then added to the ever increasing pile of non working electronic stuff. It felt like I was riding directly under my own personal Electro-Magnetic Pulse.

Ensure you always carry a waterproof. Oh how smug was I with my trusty Gortex pal nestling amongst all the other crap I cannot bring myself to jettison. That smugness lasted exactly the time it took to remember I’d failed to re-proof though laziness and meteorological delusion* The result was a small lake pooling at the elbows and wrists that gradually – but persistently – drained through to create a feeling of clammy damp.

Mudguards look a bit gay, but… they are a marked improvement on – say – flappy wet shorts rythmically slapping your thighs with each pedal stroke. It put me in mind of sharing a small, cold bath with a Bavarian Laderhosen fetishist who’d just done a line of speed. My shoes have the same porous qualities as string creating a small watersports park for Lemmings in my socks.

Don’t go offroad because it’ll be drier under the trees. It isn’t. Rather than a wet arse, I ended up with a sandy, wet arse and crazy pebble dashing from ankle to eyebrow. And a shouty bruise delivered by that tractionless combination of thin tyre and thick mud. I’m writing to the Forestry commission to demand satisfaction on the issue of who put that tree there as well.

Keep your tyres inflated. Because while there is a certain manly pleasure in rotating squashy rubber**, the downside is a tarmac faceplant caused by rapid deflation or geographical differences between tyre and rim.

All obvious stuff you would think. No more than common sense for the serious cyclist. And I too was thinking just that as spiteful rain lashed my unprotected form, my arse became increasingly exfoliated by a localised sandstorm, and my feet exhibited the first symptoms of trenchfoot.

Right at the point when I was considering lobbing the bike under a passing lorry and hitching home, the descending sun backlit hill hugging clouds and transformed the world into something Turner-Esque and rather splendid.

Deciding I could get no wetter, I headed upwards into the lightening gloom to find myself high above the house, close to twilight with no power in my lights, not much pressure in my tyres, and every inch of skin on the aquatic side of extremely soaked. The plunge home took in grass covered roads, slick, shale corners, blind bends and an immense amount of blinking.

Arrived alive, declared to disbelieving family how much I love bikes. Swapped cold water for warm and wetness outside for wine inside. Slackness on the riding front has happened again this August, and I had begun to worry that my long affair with all things two wheeled was coming to an end.

It seems not.

* It’s never rain that hard. It’s summer for Christ’s sake.

** It’s that mental image of the Bavarian. It’s got me thinking…

Dog flies, I bleed, welcome to the weekend.

On By AlexIn Other stuff2 Comments

I am only writing this because nine nails are bitten to the quick, and the other one is encased in a very large plaster. Cricket you see; a logical part of the mind chastises “it’s only a game, there is nothing you can do to alter the outcome, you should care this much” whereas the other part – that bit that goes aarrgggthh ever time a gloating Aussie scores 400 with the bat stuck to his head or something – just wants England to win back the Ashes.

Other way round, we have to make 550, they have to bowl us out, it’s over in 50 overs with a batting average reading capitulation and humiliation. They bat and the buggers just think “550? Pah, we’ll be done by tomorrow lunch and have the rest of the day off“.

And who says recycling saves the planet? It may well do but it didn’t save my finger which was surgically sliced by an unseen broken glass. Probably lost in all the wine bottles. 10 minutes of bleeding and no sympathy later, it was off to the community hospital in Ross to lie about my last tetanus and be bandaged up yet again.

It’s almost as if I’m clumsy or something. Whatever, blood loss must have been the trigger for an all expenses raid on the local camping shop, from where we left staggering under the weight of “essential” equipment. Yes, next week we’re going to try camping for the first time with the kids. Not to save money as the cost of all this kit could easily have paid for a nice hotel, with a snug little bar.

Instead we’re borrowing a tent, and heading out to the wilds of Cardigan Bay. To spend three or four days marooned under stormy skies with only a moist, smelly dog for company.

Sounds ace doesn’t it? But if the inevitable cricketing tragedy plays out, at least there’ll be radio silence. In the meantime, here are some more levitating dog pictures.

Murphy - August 09 Murphy - August 09

Murphy - August 09 Murphy - August 09

Anybody wants me, I’ll be whimpering under a blanket with only radio 4 and a hip flask for company.

Ask a silly question…

On By AlexIn Other stuff6 Comments

Remember the first time you tried something new? The mental vertigo experienced while teetering over the scary chasm of much unknowing. The gap between what you know now and what you need to know is both exciting, frustrating and occasionally terrifying. This holds for many activities explored in our younger years – learning to drive, going to work and the sweaty, fumbling of sexual experiences*

At almost pensionable age of 42, it wouldn’t be much of a stretch to think those days – like so much other stuff – are far behind me. But that’s just not the case, the pie chart of all-knowing still has at big old cake slice marked “How the fuck do I do that?“. A second, and larger, section coloured in a deep angry red reads “Why the fuck am I doing that?“. Another reason for this yawing gap between what I need to know and what I don’t can be simply summarised by this conversation with the small random child.

“Daddy, what was it like when you were 30? Was it much different” to which my considered answer was “I can’t even remember what was occurring when I was 40, only ghostly mists of largely concealed hinterland are visible before then“. Probably a bit much for an eight year old, and last time I looked she was googling for exactly where in the world “Hinterland may be located”

But the point – and yes there is one in case you were concerned I’d descended into incomprehensible dribbilisaion** – is a combination of fading memory, inability to learn new skills and an enlarged impatience gland do not offer the succour of a sanguine middle age. Yesterday extensive experience of crashing brought forth some structural changes to a much loved model glider. Some would celebrate its’ new easy-to-carry design with a detachable tailplane, and a few hundred balsa shards that can be simply transported in a spare pocket.

Others – myself included – may shake an impotent fist at the unseen meterological forces that makes landing four pounds of wood go something like “missed the ground, missed the ground, missed the ground, shit where’s it gone, HIT the ground, crraasshhhh“. My inability to close the knowledge gap takes many forms, one of them being a God given ability to ignore the advice of those who clear do know what they are talking about: “Don’t go that far behind the slope, you’ll crash” they said. “No I won’t” I said “Need a bag to carry the remains?” they then said.

Anyway it wasn’t my new glider and I can probably repair it with such skill it might even fly again. Assuming it’s carried off by a passing bird of prey with poor eyesight. But one facet of this repair splash landed in the custard of doubt***, and I inadvisedly “leveraged the power of the virtual expert” by posting a very simple question on an Internet forum. What I didn’t get was a simple answer.

The first ten replies told me not to start from here. I gently pointed out that decision had been somewhat taken away from me about the time that soft wood hit hard dirt. The next slew of responses marked out the tribal boundaries of the Flat Earthers and the New World Men. From there, an increasingly embittered argument descended into name calling and cyber-cage-fighting. When I last looked, the moderator had stepped in and a tense calm had broken out.

I don’t expect this state of affairs to last. They may need to call in ACAS or possibly the UN.

At no point, did anyone answer my question. This proves to me the Internet is rubbish, and my original approach to wield fast revving power tools in a whirling circle of woody death was clearly the right one. I may still be misinformed, cerebrally undercooked and darkenly unenlightened. And I’m sure to bugger up the repair with my normal klutzy incompetence. But – and this is huge ladies and gents – I am not sat eating my keyboard and offering to slice someone open with a balsa saw because they had the temerity to question my all-knowing craft skills.

I’m thinking we should go back to chisels, slates and shouting.

* Certainly was for me. Those sheep were FAST.

** Long term Hedgies will understand the nuance, newer readers may struggle to notice the difference

*** In the Pie Chart. Try and keep up.