I want my life back

Around the start of the year, I whinged through a predictable lament on the pointlessness of targets, before slipping in the horrific half al/half hippo fat-boy stat, and promising to do something about it. No one is more surprised that I, that cheap words were followed by somewhat more expensive deeds.

In those eight weeks, nearly 20lbs has been removed from my withering carcass. The expense has come in the form of booking an early alps long weekeend, a few race entries, and a new bike. Liposuction, or possibly full body replacement would have been cheaper.

I’m rightly quite proud of that. Slipping a bike in under the auspices of healthy living I mean, rather than the actual fat removal. That bit has been surprisingly easy mainly as it’s not a diet, it’s just a better way of living your life. Firstly, stop drinking in the week. I’m the last man with any mandate to get all preachy here, but the volume and frequency of my bottle love was sat right in the middle of what we’re told is a middle class problem.

Then eat less, exercise more. Smaller plates filled with home cooked food, heavy on the veg and missing all that processed shit that used to be the default option. Treats are treats – love a bit of Jessie’s awesome cake but the key world here is little. And not to be coupled with often. Accept that sometimes you’re going to be hungry but even that goes after a few weeks. And when you do eat, it’s a really enjoyable experience not just fast fuel.

Habits can be hard to break. At work we seem to be in a cycle of unending birthdays releasing a torrent of sugary based products on a daily basis. Once you’ve politely declined 20 times, people do stop asking. Now they just give me a banana instead, although this may be a less than subtle pointer to how I am viewed by the organisation So breaking the snacking habit is a bugger, but – if the calorie counting app is anything like accurate – a bloody important one.

That app is nasty. And it’s also pointless to those who say calorie counting is a stupid way to try and lose weight. They have the -ahem- weight of science and clinical trials to go by, I have my trouser size.  The truth is in the middle somewhere I’m sure – eat better food in less quantities while really thinking about what you’re stuffing your face with, and it’s likely you’ll see some positive results.

Mine are a waist with circumference of minus two inches,  a view of my ribs last seen by an x-ray machine and a body shape that isn’t entirely hidden by thirty years of abuse since beer was discovered. But that’s just vanity and entirely not the reason for making a bit of an effort. Riding bikes is what I love doing, and being a chunk lighter makes that an even better experience.

Not just climbing where you get there quicker but it hurts just as much. Strava – and we’ll be back to this soon – is another bastard app clearly designed for weak willed, excuses filled people like me. Now tho, longer rides aren’t so exhausting, schelpping up ‘one more climb’  makes some kind of sadistic sense, and while pedalling hard everywhere still raises an oxygen deb, at least I can just about service it.

New bikes help of course. As do recently dry and frozen trails.  And impending deadlines for the Westword 50, Wiggle 100k road ride, HONC (never again I said, it appears I lied) and a few others have me out spinning circles with a stretch goal of being second from last.

I appreciate this is all a bit self congratulatory. It’s not meant to be, more an outpouring of surprise at what’s somehow happened in eight weeks on a pie avoidance programme. Whether it’s sustainable is hard to know, but so far the rewards far outweigh any occasional cravings.

I did, for one second, consider another crack at Mountain Mayhem.  But that’s crossing a hard line between healthy living and terminal stupidity.

First goals and now targets. This smacks nastily of play mirroring work. Let’s take that and exercise it a little through a weary narrative jog. Last summer*, most of my targets were viscerally augmented to the broad suit backs of my temporary employer. Such was my calamitous state of work/life balance that the opportunity of ‘clearing angsty thirty foot hungry alligators from a Florida swamp‘ would have been met with a cost/benefit analysis something like ‘so similar work in a warmer climate with more reasonable clients, where do I sign?’

Targets are terrible things. Especially if you’re a civil engineer. As you’re merely building them as incentives for the defence industry. In the mostly pointless world of what I do, they represent a meaty slice of a vocational pizza topped with KPIs, CoEs, SoWs and YHTBFJs**.  Not that I’m complaining because through no obvious effort on my part, stuff that many people seem to find difficult is scarily easy for me. Of course I have to work hard, but not because this stuff is actually difficult to do. There’s just a lot of it.

You may have noticed that, at no time, has any effort been made to articulate exactly what that is. This isn’t me being coy or clever – it is genuinely because there’s no easy way to explain it. Even to myself. I know what it’s called but that’s not the same as what is it. Many moons ago, when we first moved out here, my efforts at school-gate communication elicited the knowledge that almost everyone had a proper job be that fireman, farmer or farrier. My best response was essentially a hand waving generic – speaking of great deeds evoked mainly by shouting at people.

So we’ve established what it isn’t. Only not really because what it is isn’t is how I see me spending the rest of my ever diminishing days. There’s a beautiful phrase about middle age which essentially talks of “Hanging on in quiet desperation is the English way” (point for artist and title). Let me share what this target fixation isn’t one more time,  and that’s a middle aged crisis because such angst would suggest one has ever pupated from mental puberty.

Any time I’ve ever felt secure in a job is the trigger for boredom followed by extremely bad mannered disruptive behaviour. Get out before being thrown out. And I have absolutely no fucking interest at all in the kind of career plan where some Apprentice-meme mutates into ‘in two years I shall be world dictator, but first: this filing‘. God if you want to be disappointed, look out of the window or into the mirror. Don’t set yourself up for failure; we are already over-burdened by a society explaining we’re wholly inadequate in terms of what we buy, the way we bring up our children, the house we live in and the car we drive.

So if we’re going to have some kind of target, let’s at least make it something we might actually enjoy doing. It’s not riding bikes – strange as that may sound, because riding is a dirt filler which papers over the cracks on an ordinary life. It’s not a way of life, it’s an escape from it.  And there’s no target that gets hit by punting myself out as a gun for hire until old age or cynicism or hitting some mythical number cries that enough is really enough.

It’s finishing a book. If we were looking at a left-to-right sequential view, it’s about starting it. Or even working out what it might be. But in four months time this contract ends and something will start. For four weeks, everything that pays the bills and provides some gossamer wisp of self worth shall be cast aside.  To see if there’s anything in my head that might make sense on paper.

Let’s save ourselves some tedious rhetoric and assume the answer to all of these questions is ‘you’ve got to be fucking joking‘ 1: have you any idea what kind of book that might be? 2: will it be finished? 3: will it make you any money? 4: do you have the mental discipline to sit in front of an empty screen every day and 5: will you have an enviable set of excuses of why the lack of any discernible output shall be considered a wild success? Oh sorry the answer to the last one is, of course, absolutely.

My mate Dave has written two books; an electronic one he’s published himself, and a second that a proper company is currently making out of real paper. For which he appears to have gainstayed any actual paying employment for the thick end of two years. Although this is simply explained by some supposed ‘research‘ that had him gallivanting to all corners of this sceptred isle to go ride his bike. But ballsy as hell – of that there is no doubt.

Google tells us that an average book is 60,000 words. That’s 2000 a day then. Creating thousands of words isn’t the problem, they might even be good words but navigable sentences is clearly going to be a big issue. And that’s before there’s any proper writing thing around plot, research, structure, narrative, etc. Still I’ve started a few so eventually I’ll have to finish one, because we all know that everyone has a book inside them. And frankly that’s probably where it should stay.

To be honest, writing this down and publishing it to an uncaring Internet is merely a device to keep me honest.  It’s nothing more than a public admission of failing to follow convictions that make perfect sense until eating becomes a priority. I’m at an age were forgetting difficult words such as large woody handled objects separating inside and outside become finger clicking, its-coming-to-me, arrrghh-you-know-the-THING  daily trial. If I don’t get my shit vaguely together, I’ll be left with nothing more than electronic spittle.

Worse case I can find my muse in dusty summer singletrack*** and revel in a world where alarms happen to other people and emails are something to be welcomed.

There I’ve said it now. No idea what happens next.

* Chronological. In no way meteorologically differentiated from winter by anything other than a slightly elevated rain temperature.

** Don’t ask. I only made one of those up. If was the one with F in it.

*** Which may involve a move to Spain.

Not so much spring, more raging torrent. But before that, this.

There’s many, many things serially broken about Christmas. Not least because it’s become less of an excuse for your righteous atheist to tediously explain to anyone who isn’t interested how we’ve hijacked a pagan festival, and more because we’ve replaced any token interest in the birth of Christ with a full on worship of the great god Capitalism.

The shit we buy. The guilt we feel. The booze we drink. The food we stuff down our throats. It’s a gluttony love in swiftly followed by an orgy of self pity when we open the credit card bill, or stare through frightened fingers at the new digital scales some bastard relative thought we might find useful.

As a mast-nailed unbeliever, there’s something beautifully ironic when to the God of Marketing the spoils, and to the being once held absolute the scraps. There’s a million people that do this argument better than I, and that’s fine because right now it’s missing the point by about 3 days.

21st December. Winter solstice. Half way out of the dark. Sure our little storm tossed island is still mostly underwater and meteorological events suggesting the season handle has not yet been cranked over. Snow and ice have been replaced by wet and floods but – horrible as it is for those who have a holiday full of nothing but sandbags and insurance call centres – it’s a temporary thing.

But before we feel even the suggestion of the season after this, there’s the brutal horror of January with its storms, new years resolutions, disappointments and reversions to the status quo, followed swiftly by the hardest month before pre-summer arrives with the promise of dry and warm but generally delivers more of the endless damp. Especially if some media prick goes wild with the ‘hosepipe ban‘ angle. Cue Ark Building.

Christmas is a brutal prism on emotion; from joy to sadness, from rhapsody to dysphoria, from can’t get enough to can’t wait for it to end. All suffered under rain clamped skies, cooped up with those you love and those you really wish would just fuck off home. Don’t misunderstand ne here, it’s not a bad thing – spending time with your loved ones and quaffing guilt free booze never is – but save me from the bonhommie and banality.

Instead let’s look beyond Jan the First and accelerate from there. Because care as I don’t about some made up day when we we all go mad with ripping wrapping paper for ten minutes, I am deeply consumed by the chronological certainty that what we’re looking at here is not the onset of winter. Oh no, ladies and gentlemen let me welcome you fulsomely to the countdown to spring.

And just to show I’m not a total Christmas Clampit, let me add this; for seven years I’ve been writing this shit. I used to think it was for the few people who took time to read it, but really it isn’t. If that was any motivation, I’d have stopped bloody ages ago. It’s for me to keep in practice. Because one day I’ll finally finish something started back in the era when hair, optimism, self belief, that kind of shit was common currency in my world.

Until then you’ll have to put up my random streams of consciousness and lop eyed view on what’s important. Which I suppose means, for those long serving hangers on and occasional readers, I shall raise the predictable glass and wish you all Merry Christmas.

Best of luck with that

That’s the sound a year makes. That’s my best guess anyway. It might go “PING” or “BOOM”, “YEEHAW” or even “FUCK ME SLOW DOWN””. At the north end of 70,000 MPH it can make any noise it likes. But I’m going with whoosh because a entire wobbly planetary rotation, with all that messing about in multiple dimensions,  appears to have passed in about the time it takes to down a much needed beer.

A chunk of this chronological discretionary is entirely due to me being on project time* which morphs yours truly into a serial problem solver fixing a million things in a sixteen hour day and spending what’s left wide awake worrying about what I’d missed.

Not too much based on the 700 people failing to understand how fucking close we were to opening the office doors with an apologetic ‘sorry, we did our best it just didn’t work out. There’s your slate, collect chisels from the stationary cupboard’.

I’ve missed many things.  Let’s take the summer for a start. Still I hear that you all missed that as well once a perfect March triggered a season full of paired animals and sandbags. I missed my family- arriving home well past the point that the kids had long gone to bed. I missed normal conversations with Carol instead substituting ‘Fuck what a day; you’ve no bloody idea’ before unloading a stream of consciousness without ever wondering aloud how she was.

I missed riding bikes although too much of this was meteorological angst wrapped up in vocational excuses. I missed every ‘not drinking in the week target’ by about 9pm on a Monday night and got so very close to a corporate ‘My bat. My ball. See ya’ flounce before guilt and a deluded opinion that sheer force of personality could overcome endless insanity**

I missed all sort of other stuff as well. Fairly focussed on delivery when Jessie started high school.  Missed her first day and I’m not getting that back. Missed Abi getting suddenly  properly full sized human with mostly formed views of the world. Missed the house acquiring proper bathrooms, furniture and paint. Nearly missed Jess outgrowing her bike, but pulled that one back and threw enough money at it to make both her day and mine.

In summary, I missed far too much. Said no to the wrong people. Not my finest hour.

A year ago I walked away from a well paid job that I found stupidly easy and equally stupefying.   Initially  with a self inflated sense of my own worth, and a view of the world the way I wanted it to be rather than the way it was. I regret neither my decision not my naivety. 13 years ago, I quit a fantastically financially rewarding position as a young(ish) technical director for a thriving firm on the rather up-your-own-bum grounds I failed to believe in what we were doing.

This was exactly at the time our first child was born.  And Carol quit work. So really chucking it in last year was methadone when compared to the full on cold turkey over a decade ago.  And if I learned anything it’s that ‘something always turns up’. It’s not a career strategy as such but it’s a valid alternative to believing in some kind of full time employment security delusion.

So in one week I’m going to stop. And for the first time in approximately ever not start straight away.  There is always a clamour to chase the next quid, cash the next cheque, stash loot for a rainy day.  I think it’s probably raining.

I’ve a book to finish***, breakfasts to have with the family, people to see about places to go, bikes to fettle, ride and adorn with new shiny bits. And yeah,  I’m sure there will be a point fairly soon when making some cash to pay the bills will once again be important.

But it’s not important right now. I’m incredibly proud of what a tiny team of ‘fuck it we won’t be beaten’ people and now friends achieved this summer. That’s gone and until I can remember what it was exactly I loved about doing what I do then I’m not going to do it.  Because most of it is fired by a spark that’s gone missing.

It’s not just missing. It’s missing the point. And  I’m done with that.

* I wrote a weighty polemic on exactly how fucked my life has been the last six months including a rapier like analysis of the failings of the many. But that’s career suicide. So you’ll have to take my word for it.

** Honestly this is the edited version. The cathartic one reads like a Tourettes diary.

*** Let’s be honest here. Start.

An attempt to describe my age as the composite of a fit 32 year old man with the mind of a 13 year old failed to illicit the hoped for response. It was strongly mooted that only if I paid random passers by to shout ‘hey Al you’re looking damn good for 30‘ and really upped my maturity game could this age denial fantasy come to pass.

Even then, it would be a stretch. But that’s the problem with growing older without growing up. Most of us in our middle years still feel about sixteen inside unti we try something physically difficult. Like bending down. My favourite definition of middle age is ‘you cannot stand up without making a noise‘,  which in my case is the grunt of effort accompanied by a creaking knee, clicking ankle and graunching shoulder.

Again the hoped for wisdom, gravitas, having the slightest clue of how I should run my life failed to be mentally unwrapped on my birthday, so – listening to that inner teenager – I went to play outside instead. Because, while the weather had continued to moistly disappoint, the summer is moving on and with it the  evening light and elevated temperatures. If I don’t shift my ravaged carcass now, what chance come winter?

Another joy of advancing years is as what little remaining hair makes a run for the shower plug, karmic balance insists on adding the tyre of fading metabolisms around the middle. To  be fair even the most active fifteen year old with a hummingbird genome would struggle to work off my Scone, Cheese and Wine diet greedily imbued on holiday.

A shifty glance in the mirror suggested bigger trousers were on the horizon unless I fancied grooving the middle aged sloping chest/straining button look so seemingly cherished by many my age.  I’m sure that as I turned away in disgust, the fat bit over the belt hung about for another second before centrifugal force wrenched it back. Bit of a relief the ensuing Newtonic reaction didn’t throw me down the stairs.

So shorts snugly fitted, a bike selected from the ‘shed of dreams‘ and a tootle out to the Malverns where fat bodies/tired legs are found out in the turn of a pedal.  A quick up and down suggested the few rides shoehorned in this last ten days had at least gainstayed the rasping breath/burning legs of a non riding man.  Still always room for improvement of bike if not rider and, as a birthday present, Martin lent me his very capable Orange 5 for a quick blast.

Not so quick uphill. It’s a bit of a pig frankly. But shod with what I assume are recycled tractor tyres and with a frame welded by a blind man working deep in the remains of the Ark Royal, it’s never going to be a sprinter. Aesthetically it’s somewhere between industrial chic and mind-bleachingly ugly so the best place to view it from is definitely on top.

I wasn’t feeling much love even from that position tho, with Martin sprinting away on my ST4 declaring it ‘fast, fun and poppy’ which is everything the 5 isn’t. Having finally winched myself to the top of a rocky descent, the time had come to remove ever withering brain, pick an object on the far horizon and see what a super stiff frame suspended on six inches of clever shock trickery could do.

It could scare me that’s for sure. Only at warp speed does this bike make sense. Any less and there’s nothing apparently happening as fat baby-head rocks and wheel sized drops are dispatched with nothing more than a feeling of sinking gently into a sofa. I knew the ST4 was a little bit flexy, but this thing is stiff beyond belief. The only feeling of speed – other than landscape being thrust at overrun optical nerves – is the noise. It’s very much like piloting an old steel filing cabinet being thrown down a metal fire escape.

As I watched Martin find the limits of my ST4, it would have been easy to go quicker. But foolish. In a moment of clarity, I realised the reason the ST4 is such a great bike for me is exactly because it does have limits that provide a perfect excuse not to go any faster. The 5 is a brilliant – if simple – piece of honed engineering, but it only makes sense if you are the type of rider who craves speed over everything else.

I’m happy to say that rider isn’t me anymore. Probably never was. Swapping bikes back, I watched Martin create an effortless gap between us on the next descent clearly defining him as exactly that type of speed freak. Fast I like, insanely fast I’ll leave to everyone else including my younger self. But that’s not going to stop me getting on a bike at every opportunity and tweaking the nose of terror. Before running away.

Ten years ago when I fetched my old rigid mountain bike out of the shed and set out , helmetless, clueless and without a thought where this may lead, the only thing of certainty was this pastime couldn’t extend beyond 45 years old. I couldn’t have been more wrong. And on that basis, it’s probably time to go and play outside again.

With comic timing, my ropey music collection threw this track up from the legendary if aged rockers AC/DC* as a ferocious storm was thrown down from under a brutal sky.  The car rocked to the beat of a stubborn jet stream as endless rain cascaded manically seeking out something dry to wet.  It was at least a  month too late with everything horizontal either saturated or already under water.

My resolve to ride wasn’t tested though.  Sufficient time had passed to dull the memory of a desperate trudge on washed out trails being chased by vengeful weather systems. Since then, scheduled rides have taken rain checks with the only sunny evening spent instead  getting fat on summer beer. I had worked out that waiting for the rain to stop would mean my next ride might be in October. Or Spain.

So it was with low expectations I headed deep into soaking hills fully grim-equipped with winter boots, waterproof socks and shorts, stout rain jacket and full on mud tyres. These expectations were more than met with the full shitty experience from trenchfoot through gritty arse crack, 6 foot or organic mud pack, boil in the bag sweating and occasional progress hard earned on slop where dust should be. This was setting up to be one of those death marches which fully tests the rule that ‘riding is always better than not riding‘

It didn’t. And not for the reasons you might think. After an hour of sliding around in obvious distress, we found a track deep in mud and possibility. Tracing it back through face high stingers, we were rewarded with a line of jumps and drops that – with a little light shovel work – have the potential to be full on shits and giggles. But that’s not the real reason either.

Ask any rider what they love about Mountain Biking and themes will coalesce around rock-hard trails, dust, drifting tyres, jumps and drops, perfect sunsets, summer breezes, a thin ribbon of dirt snaking through the bluebells, the bullshit of your friends, the oh-fuck-me not quite crash moments, the glove-tan, the oh-so-earned post ride cold ones. the craic, the new bikes, the old bikes, the places you’ve been and those you will one day go.

If alcohol is involved, a whiff of pretension will waft eulogies on being out there, being something others are not, surfing on the wave of differentiation,  the impossible to explain joy of riding bikes. I get all that, of course I do, and if you’ve ever ridden a bike for fun not transport you’ll get that too. And we’ll talk of mountain biking and an antithesis of our stressful lives, every pedal revolution unwinding the ball of weekday angst bound tight in heads too full of the wrong stuff.

And we’d be wrong. Absolutely and utterly. Missed the point by about 30 years. Because if you distil riding bikes into its purest  form, you won’t find any of those things. It is nothing more than playing outside with a bit of the possibility of adventure thrown in. This base element is packaged for 11 year old children and that’s why we love it. Well it’s why I love it anyway and if you don’t, there is nothing you will read next that can convince you otherwise. And for that you have my sympathy

Mountain Biking is marketed as an arms race.  New is good, different is better, you’re one credit card transaction from nirvana. You’re one skills course from riding perfection. You’re one winter training ride from the podium, one muscle supplement from a perfect athlete, one visualisation from a perfect downhill run. Spend, Train, Work your way to being the best you can. Because when you’re there, then you are absolutely there, nothing can make it any better. Except maybe hitting reset and starting the whole thing again. No wonder it’s called a cycle.

I’m calling that bollocks and bullshit. It’s about feeling eleven years old. It’s about playing outside when you should be doing something adult and responsible. It’s about exploring and making fishy ‘new line’ gestures, giggling and pointing. I’m lucky enough to be a parent of a child that age and I envy her view on the world; it’s exciting, it’s ever different, it’s relentlessly positive, it’s going to change and I’m ready to change with it, it’s simple and I know what I like, but I might like something else tomorrow. Bring it on.

Next month I’ll be 45 years old. I don’t care about that while I can still ride my mountain bike. Because that connects me to the eleven year old that laughs when he falls off, tramps off up unlikely looking paths with a spring in his step, rides back down them foot out and grinning. Christ, I’ll go and build a den if I like. It’s not a middle aged crisis or a second childhood – it’s making bloody sure you don’t lose sight of the first one.  It’s not serious and it’s not competitive, and it’s not a salve for a distressed moral conscience.

It’s playing outside with your friends. And a bicycle.  There is no mud, rain or cold that can touch that.

Thunderstruck? You bet.

* A bit like myself. Old, passed their best, living on past glories, quite loud.  Difference being the ‘legendary’ bit.

There are times when nothing other than riding a bike makes any sense. Endless sunny days where the trail is polished, buff-dry singletrack and you’ve discovered your inner riding God*, when you’re best mates are on top joshing form and all that stands between you and a few cold beers are hours of high speed, endorphin pumping mountain biking nirvana.

Those are the days when you absolutely have to ride. Then, right in the middle of your cycling bell curve, are days when you should be riding. Be it a ‘get-my-arse-out-of-this-comfy-bed‘ commute, or an evening blast when you’re so tired from work, or slashing your weekend to-do list with a sword of selfishness and getting back two hours after you promised. Rides that are easily bypassed by thin excuses, but everyone missed is a lament, a regret of what might have been.

And then there’s riding when you’re sick, it’s dark and wintry, cold hands fumble easy summer tasks, legs hurt from the start, breath rasps in a death rattle on every climb, tyres squirm and slide through mud and grime. Drivetrains visibily erode under corrosive grit forged from wet dirt and rock. You’re half as fast as the summer and twice as knackered. Descents that are baked into a sun kissed ribbon of joy become desperate ‘hang on and hope‘ under the grim clag of winter.

You return home totally done in, but long gone is throwing the bike in the shed and grabbing a cold one. Now it’s a logistical sequence of frozen hosepipes and clammy clothes. Standing in the midst of steaming ride gear and dripping bike, a beer is the last thing on your mind. Or at least behind, a bath, an excuse for why the washing machine is going to be broken, a mental tally of components needs replacing and the worry that non responsive toes might be a symptom of frostbite or trenchfoot.

Mentalists will regale you with the joys of winter riding.  Fitness, blah, deserted trails, Yeah Yeah, amazing moonscapes,  whatever you fucking hippy. They miss the point, the reason we ‘normals‘ ride in winter is simply because we need to. Not have to, not want to, not should do. Need. Riding bikes is a balance to the lunacy of what we spend our day doing. A see-saw with frustration, angst and irritation that needs a wheeled offset to leave you refreshed and level headed.

It is far to easy to attempt equalisation by kicking the cat, shouting at the kids, grumpily watching TV clutching a grape placebo. None of this stuff works like a mud splattered two hours with those who share your weekly therapy session. This week,  one new bike was sailing on a muddy maiden voyage accompanied by two hacking coughs, one set of recently serviced forks, a non working rear brake and our Malvern Labrador SuperFit team member knackered by lots of training.

So we didn’t go that far. But we didn’t go to the pub either which was my first, second and oft repeated idea. Instead slithery progress was made on trails glassed with tractionless dirt to the inevitable accompaniment of poorly a-tyred mountain biker on tree. My lack of rear brake was easily offset by a mud tyre on the front which carved inside a man on all-weather** rubber to set  up perfectly for a) a fab jump over a tree route and b) an accident.

A committed if foolhardy approach to a) failed to result in b) only because Fate clearly believes I’ve suffered enough lately. No way that closing my eyes and bracing for impact kept me on a trail bounded by sharp fences and eye-pokey branches. The fact that I then nearly wiped Martin and his new bike out in the ensuing “whooooaahhhsshiittnooooIvegotit………..probably” slide shows that particular God has a sense of humour.

As did we on our heavy legged return to the warmth of inside. If I had control of Wikipedia then the Mountain Biking entry would read lit 1/to gain a sense of perspective, to remember what’s important 2/to prevent obsession of unimportant things 3/ to stave off comformity.

20 kilometres on a Mountain Bike while racked with cold can do that. I’ve changed my mind about it being therapy. It’s better than that.

* who may still be a bit rubbish. But he’s better than you are that’s all that matters.

** If all-weather means Summer. In California.

A picture paints… no forget it, you’re getting the 1000 words anyway.

A month after quitting my job, I find myself almost hysterically happy at not doing some of it. Or, if I’m striving for honesty, most of it. In fact apart from the bits with friends in pubs putting the world to rights, let’s remove the fence from our arse and declare “all of it“.

Four weeks in which riding of bicycles, seeing of family, London not going to, and affirming of what’s important has put me in a very happy place. Exhibit A was last night’s ride where a much-missed pal re-joined the nocturnal pack after a knee injury had him sidelined for six months. A little wet had fallen from the sky, leaves were plastered heavily over now slippy trails and the air was full of impending winter.

Absolutely the best ingredients for an organic exploration of the hills. Ride a bit, check Martin’s knee for potential explosion, ride a bit more, get chilly chilling out, modify routes, point out flaws in everyone elses, grumble on extra climbs, then head out into territory so cheeky it should get it’s bum smacked.  Ride stupid loose, steep stuff and join grown men giggling at bullshit to the power of shared experience.

Rides like that tend to ramble on. I can feel a certain empathy there   But 10pm had been and gone which generally alarms the misery gland with London not many hours away. Get home, sort bike and gear, assemble corporate stuff for the so-near morning call, shower, set alarm don’t sleep much. Today I woke refreshed three hours past that 4:50am start and God it felt good. Lazy but good.

Having mused on this during long dog walks and some strategic looking out of the window, clearly the only issue with this life-choice is simply that no-one will pay for you being a slacker. Which is how I have always viewed my approach to life. Honestly, where others saw hard work and dedication,  I was internalising slights of hand, a stupidly good memory and the belief that everyone else was just a bit more shit. Really, my finest work would have been a treatise on “the importance of being idle” had not Oasis got there first.

It seems this may not be the case. Feelings of guilt shocked me into tense mutterings about what next. Suddenly every expense becomes an agony, best get the car serviced*, can’t let the kids watch TV all half term, really need a new front door – it has been pointed out to me that this is the way most people operate without a vastly inflated salary. And while we’re not exactly fiscally destitute, any environment reigning in bike spending for a whole month probably has some merit.

So it was back to the evil marketing shed for ideas around legal larceny. Riding bikes and writing nonsense seemed attractive until my old Pal Dave Barter explained that while taking a year off to complete a cycling route guide had been challenging, fulfilling and a fantastic life experience, it hadn’t actually made him very much money. And he’s far better at it than I am. So examining the few skills built up over *christ how much* 22 years of paid employment, it became clear the rut most travelled probably held the best prospect of paying the mortgage.

Half of those 22 years, I have worked for other people. Frankly, it’s not been an experience either of us has enjoyed. Jumping back into that was on the testicle slamming side of entirely delusional in terms of how it might be different. So I crossed that straight off. Not true actually, I never wrote it down in the first place.

So with Hobson and his uni-choice in the chair, working for myself appeared to be the only realistic option. Done it before, quite enjoyed it, rarely were security called to escort me from client site,  people seemed on the satisfied side of invoice paying. And I have a certain passion for work which might sound pretty damn stupid when it’s just IT, but let me ask you this… if you spend 3/4 of your natural life spending every day doing something you don’t care about, how dumb is that?

If nothing else, my MacBook and iPhone become legitimate expenses. I have enough contacts and – apparently – credibility to ensure days will not be spent waiting for the phone to ring. And while London looms large in at least some of my working life, it’ll be on my dollar and for someone who’ll probably notice whether I’m there or not.

It’s not much of a plan, but it’s a start. And having just re-read my unpublished vitriol written the day I left, it’s not just a start but a step in the right direction.

Wish me luck, I’m going in.

* £250 only to be discover than “nothing to worry about” means “yeah it needs a new condenser and the brake pads are knackered, shall we just keep your credit card?“

Nearly six years ago I took this job for six months. That over-run casts many of the projects I’ve worked on in a far more pleasing light. Sure we’ve missed the odd deadline, a few  months, maybe a year, okay a bit more than a year late on occasion – but FIVE YEARS late on a six month project. That’s appalling.

A bright future in project management awaits then.

It’s been a week of many lasts; last time on this train, last time lost in the swarm of the tunnel rats, last time to use my security pass, last time to fabricate my timesheet.

Not the last time I’ll be going to the pub today. Because Lunchtime and Evening should count double, unless they blur into one mad drunken slur from midday to midnight.

I feel the very best I can hope for from this evening is to retain a smidgen of my dignity. And even that would be a bonus based on my dismissing tolerance to alcohol allied with an absolute belief I’m still about 18.

So this would probably be a good time to worry. Not about the prospect of being trundled home in a wheelbarrow or shopping trolley* as that’s mostly pre-destined and beyond my control. No, about what happens next.

I look into a diary that is normally crammed full of meetings, conference calls and other stuff pertaining to be useful. And I see nothing but ‘dead air‘, white space and endless days filled with bugger all. And yet I’m curiously unbothered about the prospect of unemployment.

And while my primary emotion is not as strong as exultation, it is certainly stronger than relief. It smells like freedom and that’s my kind of rarefied air. I’m swinging between lunatic-asylum giggling and wild thoughts on the farming of lettuces.

I suppose it comes down to this; I’ve spent 20 years+ working and have at least as much again to go. I’ve not enjoyed that much of it, so it seems pointless to continue to plough that particular furrow.

We seem to live in a world  – from childhood to retirement – in a state of delayed gratification. Work hard, get good grades, work harder, get promoted, work longer for your pension. Retire, Die.

I’m sure there’s a better way. I’m just not sure what it is

* Not home exactly. A friend’s in Ealing. Or East Slough as I like to think of it.

That title and this graph are fairly representative of what I laughingly refer to as my “creative thought process“. Pretentious as that is, it’s still marginally preferable to “nicking other people work and augmenting it with amusing couplets“. For example while I was attempting to weave Ballistic Lozenge into an bike mag article, my semantic direction was shunted onto a branch line marked “Pelaton Sausages and Endurance Cabbages“.

Inevitably the diminishing cerebral mass was then entirely focussed on partnering vegetables to non obvious adjectives, and the moment was lost. Article unwritten, attention distracted, browser opened, someone else’s pie chart sniggered at.

This is why I have the greatest respect for Dave who gave up a perfectly responsible job to write his own book. Not only is Dave properly coffee-splutteringly amusing more than once in a while, he’s also a fellow cyclist. Okay, mainly a roadie but even such poor genre judgement in no way distracts from a ballsy project with uncertain earnings at the end of it.

My sympathy for Dave is mitigated by his weekly entries of fantastic cycling in myriad locations – allegedly to support his forthcoming publication. It’s often said that everyone has a book in them, and frankly – for most – that’s the best place for it to stay. The bookshelf of the mind is littered with terrible ideas, rubbish plots, unformed characters and educationally sub normal grammar.

Ask me how I know So much as I would love to sit in my lovely wooden office, looking outside into the fields and being consumed with literary fervour, realistically my only marketable skills involves technology, shouting at people and waving my hands around in an attempt to deflect criticism.

This is not entirely disappointing. Like riding bikes for a living, I cherish the stereotype that writing for food would in some way cheapen and diminish the very thing I enjoy doing. And the pay is rubbish; for every JK Rowling, there’s a slew of breadline unpublished authors desperate for a break. Maybe that’s eBooks, but the signal to noise ratio suggests even a successful ebooker is barely going to raise their level of poverty to “imperceptibly above the breadline”

Not everyone can be an astronaut eh? So is there a point to my rambling?  Not really,  but that shouldn’t come as shock for my regular reader(s). Maybe it’s just the grinding realisation of yet another upcoming birthday that if it hasn’t happened yet, it probably isn’t going to. This is the kind of pretentious nonsense that calls for a bike ride and some piss taking.

I think I’ll go and do that then.