There is always a double knot of anxiety and anticipation when packing riding rucksacks and fettling pointlessly, when facing the prospect of riding somewhere a little edgy. This is a useful simile because Morocco is essentially an ancient, extinct volcano circumcised by donkey tracks and watered by mountain snow melt. Global warning here doesn’t mean the loss of a few ski-ing slopes – no with bugger all annual rainfall, the entire south of the country is a couple of warm winters away from sliding back into the desert.

So a Landrover supported trip into the mountains shuttles us high into the foothills on increasingly crumbling roads clinging to ever steepening slopes. And where the Landy cannot go, the semi-nomadic villages and their animals can, creating vast swathes of lonely singletrack hugging the side of the mountains in a series of never ending rocky switchbacks. It is is – by degrees – achingly beautiful, stunningly unspoilt and bloody terrifying.

The villages are cut into the hillside, camouflaged by the sandstone – itself cleaved from anywhere close enough to hand carry it. They appear at first crude and unfinished but that’s just through the prism of the Western eye. Each building blends perfectly with its’ surroundings, ensues form for function and its’ inhabitants lack nothing in terms of fierce pride in their culture easily mixed with genuine hospitality.

Loading the Landy is always a faff and we’re about an hour late striking out beyond the lunacy of the city. But it’s only ninety minutes into the mountains and soon we’re climbing reasonable gradients at unreasonable altitudes, low lying lungs painfully adjusting to the thinner air.

One of the joys of riding a bike off road is you get to learn the extremes of personality unshielded by any veneer of social convention. I know how well each of my friends climb steep slopes, how able and brave they are going the other way, where they are fast and smooth or slow and nervous. How they react when it’s all wet, cold and shit and their bike is ‘just fucking useless‘ and the unashamed joy of when they’re on it and nothing else can ever get close. This is stuff you understand before anyone volunteers a vocation or springs a surprising family in a bleak car park.

Today we were all a bit average. Desperately happy to be out riding our bikes, but a bit clumsy and lacking in any sort of flow. I like to think of this as my ground state. The first downhill confirmed what I really already knew in that my trusty bike was a barely ridable pogo stick and my shoulder was just a smidgen from being totally fucked.

The sight of my friends snaking away in ever increasing distances was one that became irritatingly familiar over the next three days. A combination of being properly averse to falling on the shoulder and said limb not being of any real use other than for resting lightly on the bar. And aching.

Fiddling around with shock pressures and quaffing ibuprofen kept me going most of the day though and what a great day it was. Officially the warm up, it still threw up nasty little climbs, endless off camber singletrack and fast blasts down dusty fireroads. The landy was always somewhere close, carrying all our stuff, lunch and our rather splendid Berber driver going by the name of Najiv.

30 years old, brilliantly competent in the drivers seat, making local salads and shooing away the occasional seller of tat. His English was better than my long forgotten French (Morocco has been independent of the French since around 1954 but along with infinate Arab dialects, it’s still the common language) and through a bit of both he explained he was away from his wife and kids for six months at a time to earn a living.

Jason had the first proper stack, dumping his front wheel in a rocky gorge and pirouetting over the bars at a velocity marked “that’s going to fucking hurt“. But he emerged unscathed leaving me cursing silently on the unfairness of life. Clearly I am just Mr. Mong and I’d better get used to it. My shoulder really had had enough by this time but my ego hadn’t so I grimaced on for the remainder of the day until two late punctures provided the excuse I was looking for to quit.

Somehow a packet of 20 Malboro had been planted on my temple like form so it seemed a shame not to smoke a couple in the warn sunshine leaning on the handy landrover. I’m a cheap date when it comes to finding some inner peace and mountains, bikes and a general lack of responsibility does it every time.

We shuttled 20 clicks up to a Mountain lodge run by a sour faced French dame whose father had clearly been Vichy. She didn’t like us much and dispatched us to a remote bunkhouse warmed only by steaming ride kit and sufficient methane to ratchet up global warming. But there was more beer, more bollocks and a partial lunar eclipse perfectly framed by a total lack of light pollution.

And since we were on the top of the mountain, tomorrow was all downhill apparently.

Morocco is a fantastic place to visit. Flying into Marrakesh, your first thought is that the place is splendidly bonkers especially in the old walled city. The Medina is home to a very large Souk, a traffic system that must kill thousands and the kind of street theatre you could watch all day. The Souk can be simply described as an unmappable maze of interconnecting alleys fronted by tiny stalls selling everything. Some of it is tourist tat, but most of it isn’t with amazing spice shops crammed into tiny corners and welders practising their trade in the middle of the street.

And what streets they are – however narrow they must support at least five lanes of duplex traffic. You must never, even for a split second, glance behind you because rotating back frontwards will put you within biting distance of an irritated donkey or under the wheels of a scooter driven with the spirit of the immortal. The system seems to be trail sharing at it’s most democratic, pedestrians are rarely knocked over by donkeys who – in turn – are not abused by the plethora of barely working two wheel vehicles. Cars weave between this menagerie of random and road crossing becomes a simple process of “clench buttocks and run for it“. Don’t bother looking for a gap, there never is one.

But somehow it works. It is as if the town planners went on a fact finding mission to Mumbai and said “like what you are doing here but it’s not quite noisy enough and lacks a little danger”

Our hotel was smack bang in the middle of maelstrom of noise and movement and you are immediately struck by how cheerful everyone is. This isn’t some Muslim fundermentalist state, it’s more a generationally muted warrior tribe making a religious lifestyle choice. Sure you still get nutters and panhandlers but at least they are happy nutters.

The joy of arriving somewhere hot and happy was soon mitigated by the discovery that my bike was secondary picketing my still busted shoulder. The complex and expensive rear suspension had been transformed into a pogo stick when the damping circuits had clearly been seized by customs.

My plan for riding around the injury by setting the bike up super soft and sofa like was now somewhat compromised. Every time I touched a brake or rode over a large pebble, the rear end of the bike would rise like a kracken from the deep and transfer my body weight forward to my shoulders. One of which really didn’t want any weight on it at all.

A gentle ride round the walled city and a mad dash through the souk shredded the remains of my denial that everything would be all right on the night. But I was on holiday with my friends, we’d been promised there would be some infidel beverages with dinner and tomorrow we would be in the mountains.

So we watched the sun go down over the main square, sipping soft drinks and marvelling at what the locals could do with first a snake, and latterly with a pidgin and a hedgehog. I kid you not.

… so no time to tell you how this brave little soldier whimpered through the pain barrier and battled past a non working limb to courageously wrest another beer from the bar. I’m welling up here I can tell you.

Work and a million emails have truncated my day from 8am to now with almost nothing in between, so it’ll all have to wait until things quieten down. I don’t expect it’ll be worth waiting for but, you know, you might get lucky.

In the meantime, there was quite alot of this going on.

And some looking at these:

That’s the mountains, not the Donkeys.

The very short summary is my shoulder is possibly now a little more painful then immediately post spang three weeks ago, my bike broke before I had chance to ride it and at one point, there was the real and immediate threat of a beer drought.

The shorter summary is it was bloody fantastic 🙂

This picture was taken by my friend Jay “now in deep Therapy” Tejani who foolishly ventured out on his mountain bike into the Chilterns. Where he spent a happy two hours pushing the bike DOWNHILL and whimpering at the trail conditions.

Petrol in the South East is broken. We appear to have entered monsoon season in the UK and there is nothing on the TV. Time to leave.

The frenzy of packing is over. It began well with forecasted temperatures hitting eighty degrees and rain only happening to other countries. Shorts, T-shirts and suntan cream then? Er no, a little more meteorological investigation indicated that temperatures in the mountains we were cycling over are considerably lower and the weather a tad less consistent.

No problem, just pack everything I own in the bag. Small problem is the bag now exceeds the weight allowance for the entire plane. The poor aircraft would have to taxi all the way there, and the the entire flange of baggage handlers may spontaneously explode if they tried to lift it. Plan C was a headless chicken like “Maybe this top, no, no this one, er hang on if I pack that, then I won’t need this, er, er, oh fuck it, that’ll have to do“. A sophisticated and measured approach I’m sure you’ll agree.

The bike bag had similar treatment until a moment of uncharacteristic honestly exposed the nonsense of packing any tools other than a small mallet. Realistically my only options on bike breakage are to leave it there for the natives to eat or hire a passing goat to portage me and the bike back to Marrakesh.

Having endured this mental anguish without the soothing pumice of a large drink, further irritation was plastered on during an ill fated trip to town. The reasons behind this last minute trolley dash are too painful to recount, and all that needs to be said can be summed in a conversation I had with a small man in a large suit sporting a glossy brochure and a nervous smile.

“Can I interest Sir with a unique opportunity in the exciting area of double glazing?”
Now normally I feel sorry for these people; they too probably wanted to be astronauts or the Prime Minister (considering our current one, I’d give ’em my vote) but vocationally have been tossed the unedifying prospect of tricking idiots to part with their money. Actually, maybe they should be Prime Minister.

I replied evenly “Young Man, I would rather marinate my testicles in aftershave and roast them over an open fire for eternity than spend one minute with your shiny suit and shiny brochures” I looked him deep in the eye “Trust me on this”

He backed away nervously muttering “why do I always get the nutters?“. Frankly he’s lucky, if I hadn’t been busy, I would have killed him there and then and offered up “Services to the Gene Pool” as my cast iron defense.

But I’m saving that for the first SleazyJet staff member who attempts to wrest any more money from my innocent person. First it was£30 for the bikes, then about a thousand pounds for hidden taxes followed by a further£20 because the government are robbing, greedy bastards with a spurious green agenda. That’s kind of how I interpreted their email anyway.

Assuming I do not suffer radishing* from Mountain Bandits, or plunge headlong into a rocky crevasse screaming “I told you that shoulder was no good“, then – come Tuesday – photographs, tales of great daring and other lies shall light up the hedgehog. Until then, have a good one or “How much for your goat and your sister” which is the traditional form of greeting in Marrakesh apparently.

* A lighter form of ravishing for the modern tourist

That’s my friends’ best medical diagnosis of the spare nose I’ve grown on my shoulder. On Saturday, under clear skies and with temperatures in the mid 70’s, I should be doing a bit of this.

That’s a trail in Morocco and it’s easily identifiable as “not this country” because water is not cascading down it, the bike doesn’t appear to be weighed down with a tonne of finest mud products, and the sky has something in it other than rain.

Aside from the insanely early flight, this trip has much going for it; great friends, dry trails, a support vehicle that will shuttle you up those difficult hills and a country I’ve never been too. Weighing against this is the shoulder of doubt and its’ worrying nobblyness. Having seen no improvement and less sleep for the last week or so, I see my options as:

1/ Demand an A&E X-Ray and some useful treatment.
2/ Do nothing and hope for the best
3/ Be sensible and don’t ride because the potential for fuck ups are legion.

Problem with 1/ is if they find something cracked or bust, it invalidates my riding insurance. Problem with 3/ is that it is extremely dull. So 2/ it is then with additional camera batteries and patience if riding becomes too difficult and I become “man, tanning on truck”

I’ve been looking forward to this trip through the dark and wet winter months. To say I’m irritated after taking ownership – yet again – of the mantle of mong would be a bit of an understatement.

For those of you neither of mountain bike or mechanical persuasion, I heartily recommend you look away now. For the rest of you, I am seeking re-entry through the bolted door – double locked with nailed wood – which bars entry to “the tools of war“. Yes after a day where I was forced to self-harm with the “spoon of hurt“, it seemed apposite to explode violently creating a blast radius where there was once expensive bike parts.

The reasons are simple. My crushing inability to wield even the most harmless tool without the kind of collateral damage last seen during the Tet Offensive is well documented. My mental detonation was fused by a series of meetings where the word “estimating” had euphemistically replaced the rather more accurate “fucking hell, let’s just have a wild guess eh and then fuck off home”. Chiltern Railways then provided all the cerebral C4 a man can reasonably be expected to handle when abandoning us first in Rickmansworth, then ChorleyWood, then Chalfont and Latimer before grinding to a shunting halt somewhere outside Amersham.

The final spark was travelling in a suit, compressed into a carriage I’d inadvertently wandered into not realising it was reserved only for those with weapons grade body odour and a seat companion who was both fat AND sniffly. I really want my shoulder to work so I can smell at them right back and stave off arse cheeks the size of Belgium.

So right now, I’m looking at this.

Out of shot are some serious tools normally spun by men sporting a stern expression and a damp rollup behind the ear, whose only clothes are three pairs of identical oil stained overalls. The type of bloke who can rebate a dwell angle inlet valve and create almost any shape from an old nail and a stick. Copies of well thumbed “What Lathe incorporating Popular Angle Grinder” litter every horizontal surface and the remnants of a once proud engineering nation are clear to see.

I’m not like that. I’m less studied, more twitchy and far, far more destructive. I don’t want to be but when God was handing out motor skills, I was accidentally setting fire to an angel. If all that remains of something once lovely are a few collapsing atoms and a guilty expression, it’s probably been FBA. I like to think of that as Fixed By Alex although some would select a different F verb.

In front of me are a headset press, a bottom bracket facing tool, a thread reamer and a star fangled nut. No, I’ve really no idea what they are do either but each offers sufficient flat metal to receive a well directed hammer blow. But I think the frame could take it – it appears to have been hewn from deck sections of the Graf Spee and welded by uncomplicated men who bond ocean spanning bridges for their day jobs.

My last steel frame was all swoopy lines and pretty detailing. It was a wheeled gazelle, frolicking in the fields and breezily galloping down trails barely marking their surface. This frame however does not frolic. It has no truck with leaving the surface untouched – rather it stamps like an invading army beating the ground into submission and if that fails, eating it. Someone has looked at a bunch of stress models on a computer screen, thought “bugger this” and added 25{45ac9c3234d371044e23e276755ef3a4dde8f1068375defba7d385ca3cd4deb2} more thickness to every tube.

A sticker proclaims this angry amalgam of tubes is lightweight steel. But I’m not sure, I think it is a little known oxide of annoyance and hostility well hidden in the periodic table. I think it’s made of Chunk.

So I could make a start. What is the worse thing that could happen? Or for those of us with a fevered imagination, what’s the 10th worse thing that could happen? I’m having a badger* to think about it.

Oh and it’s battleship gray. Co-incidence? I think not.

* This is not some kind of nasty “bodging the badger” sexual metaphor. It’s a beer. Honest.

I’m not a man who deals well with boredom. And since I can’t ride proper bikes at the moment, I’ve already served a Sunday penance on the Turbo Trainer and jetwashed both children. In a desperate attempt to remove myself from rubbish TV, I found this nifty free add on to Firefox (similar to IE in the same way that Linux is similar and way better than Windows) which grabs web text and pictures and sends them hurtling to the hedgehog.

A picture from James showing a man winning the inaugural “Hug a Tree with your head” competition at Glentress in Scotland. An outstanding effort easily painful enough to secure first prize.

There’s a litany of pain, suffering and amusement to be found on this thread posted on Singletrackworld. My picture started it but it just gets better and better.

Another weekend where riding through mud and gloop is happening to almost everyone I know. Gloaters the lot of them, struggling through trails rendered unrecognisable by Winters’ glacial ascent over the hard packed singletrack of a forgotten summer. Like a monster from the deep, brown slop rises inexorably over your favourite tracks and the water table rises with it.

So while those lucky bastards are sliding about in freezing conditions and condemning their wallets to hard day at component replacement central, I was left to muse on an inability to bounce which seems inescapably linked to increasing age.

Back in 2001, when the world seemed a simpler place and mountain bikes replaced motorbikes as my mental illness of choice, I hardly ever hurt myself. Sure I fell off “ often “ but never injuring anything other than inflated pride and wearing the scars as this years accessory to tight lycra. That’s another thing that has changed, any attempt to squeeze myself into those riding garments would see great swathes of extra flesh trying to get back out again.

Still being rubbish will eventually catch up with you and it didn’t have to run that hard when I swapped fitness for fun. Here’s an abridged chronology of who broke what where from 2005.

Feb 2005:
Jump going badly wrong resulting in a testicle slam that broke the saddle. Yes that’s right I bent and broke a steel railed saddle with my bollocks. Feel free to grab your sack and go all cross eyed. I know I did.

May 2005
Failing to lower the saddle when pitching into the pit of doom. Spat out forward in accordance with laws of physics. Sharp flint created additional arse crack and 35lb freeride bike added all body bruising as it fell out of the sky from a great height. Onto my head.

June 2005
Target fixation on a tree while clipped in for the first time in four months. Practical experiment testing the theory that if can’t tear your eyes away from an impending tree you will hit it. Hypothesis confirmed at the cost of a cracked rib.

December 2005
Refusal to admit that crappy balance centre and fear of heights above 6 inches prevent a man from being a North Shore God. Plank bites Man. Some blood and recently repaired rib much disturbed. Sleeping optional for a week or so, breathing less so but I wish it had been.

July 2006
Six months of atheism when the Cult of the Monged was calling to others. Made a bloody sacrificial offering to Altyr Of The Broken when a tyre lost a battle of traction with gravity, and knee lost a battle of abrasion with a spikey flint. Was latterly awarded Order of the Mong, first class. Became a fervent believer in Fate, to whit her specific irritation that with yours truly.

August 2006
Second day back on the bike after interesting noughts and crosses motif inscribed on kneecap by man with wire brush and needle. Courageously removed one arm from bars on flat section of trail and was instantly transported to the horizontal. Smashed up recently healed elbow due mainly to arm pads protecting the inside of the car. Sown back up by GP’s son who’d got a pretty good idea of what to do and medicated entirely by Nurse Stella Artois for days afterwards.

January 2007
A doomed attempt at a stylish takeoff ended “ unsurprisingly “ in a footless landing with limbs vigorously attempting to escape the host before a head slam to dirt bank brought home the full meaning of deceleration trauma. Adrenalin painkillers got me home at which point pain turned up and hung around for a few days.

February 2007.
Stuffed a front wheel into a muddy ditch. Ditch deeper than anticipated with a groundhoggy ˜here we go again‘ exit over the bars. Bars provided the perfect foil for soft flesh and bruises marched from the toes upwards.

February 2007.
Stump bites man. Shoulder now on disability benefit and showing no signs of wishing to return to work.

Now there’s a school of thought much aired in the Leigh household than maybe, just maybe, this hobby is too expensive both in terms of time, hard cash and body parts. Hah, I would rather chop off the offending limb that brook even a tributary of that argument.

Because between the accidents, I was having the time of my life and until the risk/reward ratio tips firmly towards being to broken or too scared to carry on, it’ll be business as usual.

Although can someone else have a turn at crashing? Thanks.