The other day, some cheeky bugger accused me of being a card carrying Daily Flail reader. So shocked at this defamatory slur and so sure of my own hand wringing liberal credentials, I got all mung-bean on his arse. But, obviously only in an inclusive, consultative ‘we’re all in it together donchaknow’ kind of way‘. Honestly if I sat on the fence any harder, I’d get splinters but this one off affront to my wishy washy tenancies soon became a two off when someone lent me a book by Jeremy Clarkson because they honestly believed a little of my style matched his.

What? Middle aged bloke ranting at easy targets to an appreciative audience, chucking in just enough contention to preserve some kind of hipness rating. Can’t see it myself, although clearly he’s made a decent living out of being a pretend-radical arse and has verb conjugating off to a fine art. Not that I’d ever prostitute myself on the altar of commercialism because a. it’d go against everything I believe in and b. I’d be there along time echoing “hello” into an empty void.

Still it’s better than being lumped in with the “who should we hate this week” mob of the Mail and maybe one day somebody’ll say “you know that Shakespeare, there’s an odd bloke with a blog who’s a little like him….“. I’m prepared for a long wait.

Anyway the backside of these perceived slights fired off a righteous article on Daily Mail readers with a focus on their little englander mentally and the paucity of the sports pages. So here it is then – except I brought the wrong writing book home and no-one deserves either the Spanish Inquisition or a lengthy discourse on the inner workings of the firm. So instead, I’ll talk about mud – of which here in the Chilterns we have about a thousand words to describe it. Eskimo’s* would recognise our characterisations of sloppy, thick, wheel arresting, wet, oggy, face splattering and cowshit with further subdivisions of elasticity, flingable range and smell.

And in another thriller like twist, that’s not the mud we’re looking for here. This is what my expensive bike looked like earlier.

That’ll be Wales in the Autumn then; the grass is that green for a reason, it rains a great deal to the point where it’s hard to distinguish between reservoirs and flooded fields. I’m not big on cleaning bikes mainly because of the intense dullness of any job requiring the outside use of a toothbrush but also because my one pristine bike is channeling ScarFace. It looks as if the bloke off the Texas Chainsaw Massacre has briefly moonlighted with an anglegrinder and gone to work on America’s finest.

Never mind, it’s over eighteen months old which makes it the elderly bull elephant in the bikey herd. I could keep it for ever, learn to ride it properly and practice non passive-aggressive maintenance techniques, or I could punt it onto the electronic graveyard and see what new clothes the Emperor is currently modeling.

If two anti ego strokes weren’t enough, a further blight to the crop of self esteem came when posts of non bike denomination were demanded in some kind of multi faith love in. You’ve got to appreciate the limited resources I’m working with here – my last dalliance with attempting to become erudite led to me gluing my fingers together. But the snoop cocking Mail article will follow assuming I didn’t write it up as a set of meeting minutes. In which case I’ll be revisiting the commercialism thing 😉

If you like your mud up close and personal, welcome to the word of the macro

* Yes, I do know that Eskimo’s actually have only a few words for snow. I believe most of their vocabulary is made up of phrases to cover “fuck, it’s dark”, “fuck, it’s cold” and “fuck sorry, I thought you were the husky”.