Category: Bikes

Tens of thousands of words and the odd blurred picture of fast moving vegetation rehashing one of two tenuous threads. Spliced together using random punctuation and alcohol.

Well, that’s a bit of a worry.

On By AlexIn Other stuff, Pretentious nonsense5 Comments

A study today “ researched with all the rigour a single train journey allows “ shows a key finding that I’m sharing the carriage with a bunch of bloody Nazi’s. This hypothesis is based on a random sampling of those performing the three handed trick of coffee, briefcase and newspaper. And the newspaper of choice was the Daily Flail.

This is not some statistical anomaly, over 50{45ac9c3234d371044e23e276755ef3a4dde8f1068375defba7d385ca3cd4deb2} of these suited and jackbooted city types were nodding away at a politically correct version of Johnny Foreigner starts at Calais and that’s where he should bloody well stay‘. Cautiously I peeked inside an abandoned copy to check whether my prejudices were as bad as those reading the Mail. They are, mine aren’t “ it’s all sneering at liberalism, and spiteful vitriol at an all encompassing moral sub class defined as Anti Britishness“. All the history you’ll ever need to learn from the Union Jack and a copy of Biggles.

So aside from those commuting to the London offices of the Gestapo, what were the remainder of my esteemed travelers reading? Around 10{45ac9c3234d371044e23e276755ef3a4dde8f1068375defba7d385ca3cd4deb2} were struggling with the full size but comparatively moderate Daily ToryGraph, a few more checking the size of their portfolios in the Financial times and the rest plotting world domination on that crucible of the modern communications age; Lucifers Notebook. Known as the Blackberry by those who own them and oh for God’s sake, turn the bloody thing off will you” by the rest of us.

A friend of mine perfectly places it at the centre of all things stupid with this comment: I sat next to a bloke with a Blackberry on the tube the other month. He was beavering away spinning his little jogwheel and pressing buttons, giving every impression of being a vital informational hub in his critical enterprise. Actually he was playing Tetris.”

Anyway I digress but for good reason because train journeys should be for sleep, reading or slack jawed looking out of the window. Not balancing every electronic item you own on your knee and then looking horrified as someone accidentally spills coffee all over them.

So that accounts for most reading material in the carriage. Of those left, one bloke was getting excited reading an article on how to install bow thrusters�? and exactly one other was reading the Guardian. That’d be me then. I expected, at any time, to be asked for my paper and possibly my papers before being ejected from the train. Go and live in a nude commune, you bloody tax dodging hippy‘ would have been their derisive farewell cry as I plunged down the embankment.

So all in all a bit of a quandary; as a self confessed hand wringing liberal, I feel I must vigorously defend everyone’s right to be intellectually closeted and mean spirited. But does that include those who read the Mail? Talk about pushing the limits of democratic acceptability. Surely I should be allowed to harm one of them if only to set an example?

What to do? Maybe I’ll source a copy of the Sun or Daily Star in the spirit of comparative experimentation. This may be troublesome as the station café offers only right wing ideology and copies of Mein Kampf. But I think it’ll be worth the effort.

Right now that’s off my chest, next up is the story of a bloke with “ literally “ a rocket up his arse. The kind of story the Daily Mail would approvingly headline Illegal Immigrants on fast track home”

Gone tomorrow, hair today.

On By AlexIn Bikes, Road Riding2 Comments

I’ve decided to grow a beard – although if one was striving for complete accuracy, this is merely a hairy symptom of not shaving. It’s a little known indicator of Ebola/Flu/a minor cold that your upper lip becomes anything but stiff when serially assaulted with snot and ˜soft‘ tissues. Soft my arse or possibly soft as my arse, these barely disguised sheets of weapons grade wet’n’dry turn the under-nasal area into a no shave zone.

So on finally staggering valiantly into the office, only 90{45ac9c3234d371044e23e276755ef3a4dde8f1068375defba7d385ca3cd4deb2} of my professional associates burst into violent fits of laughter. The other 10{45ac9c3234d371044e23e276755ef3a4dde8f1068375defba7d385ca3cd4deb2} either held that laughter in long enough to make it to the bogs before collapsing in unconstrained mirth, or are so brain dead they failed to notice a wizened old rat clamped around my jaw.

Still I believe in all it’s goaty greyness it adds a certain gravitas and dignity to an otherwise undistinguished fizog. I may be tramping alone in the word of facial fashion on this one but it’s keeping me warm on cold commutes, providing a repository for emergency food and “ in extreme circumstances “ may offer a full head of hair if I can merely rotate the old spud 180 degrees.

So I think you’re all with me here; a bit of a winner all round.

Sadly the addition of a weighty facial hair and the loss of a lung to asthma in no way crimped off the competitive gland. Having been removed from the traffic biorhythms for the last week, I was out of sync with a three light set and he sneaked past without any respect for my bearded and snotty countenance. A bit of a cycling conundrum was he with a worthy but elderly race bike, a pair of fierce looking calves and bicycle clips. Had it not been for the old diorriha preventers, I’d not have raised what little game remains but honestly BICYCLE CLIPS.

Not only was he terribly confused about the acceptability of these seventies anti-icons, he also was pretty damn nifty through the traffic with his narrow bars and suicidal approach to closing gaps. I strapped on the metaphoric tortoise shell and played the long game, catching him on half remembered light sequences and sprinting past up Constitution hill having taken a lengthy draft up the mall.

He wasn’t happy. I could tell as we circled each other like wary stags waiting for release up into Hyde Park. Nobody was clipping out of pedals here but I broke first opting for a lengthy trackstand while still maintaining eye contact. I’m not sure he was impressed but I certainly was, and when the green fired off instant sprints across the traffic, an impromptu wheelie marked my determination to be first into the park.

This is my personal Mount Ventoux. Oh I can hear you mocking but put the world’s finest riders on crappy commuter bikes after a day in our offices and let them attempt to sprint past the local dogging club and suicidally black clad pedestrians, and I’m heading for a podium. So a desperate 200 seconds followed where Al just the one available lung” Leigh revved up his biggest gear and manfully resisted the strong urge to throw up.

Looking back is a sign of weakness and I had enough of those already so it wasn’t until the Bayswater road stuttered into my personal geography did I steal a glance. The perfect commuter win is when your assailant is still in sight, far enough back for it to be clear to everyone he’s a broken man but close enough that your gloating cannot be mistaken for constipation.

He was nowhere in sight. I can only assume he turned off some distance before. To say I feel aggrieved is akin to wondering if the French ever felt slightly piqued that we nicked all the best bits of Canada once they’d colonised it and named it new France. I nearly went back to find the ungrateful bugger and demand an explanation.

First bicycle clips and now this. Honestly, some people have no idea at all.

Well that™s breakfast sorted then.

On By AlexIn Other stuff, Pretentious nonsense3 Comments

I see from the Torygraph that you can now digest the daily calorific limit with just a single meal from Burger King. Sounds good to me, get out of bed, drive to the nearest SuperSizeMe outlet and tuck into an athlete’s breakfast. On the downside, the rest of the day is a bit of a write off since your bloated stomach will demand heroic efforts are made to break down a pound of saturated fat. A process that is best approached from a horizontal position while exercising lightly with the TV remote control.

In the same way that alcohol makes people appear thinner and more attractive, burgers have the opposite effect adding chins, dribble and nailed on certainly heart failure to a list of existing mental defects including limited willpower. Ostrich like though this behavior is, it does mirror what passes for chocolate eating rationale while on a slimming diet.

You know the kind of thing; It says I can have a glass of wine and a bacon sandwich for breakfast followed by an entire bison for lunch as long as I include too oxygenating vegetables“. Even with only sufficient nutritional knowledge to barely separate green beans from baked beans, even I can see this for the nonsense it so obviously is. How can dieting be a multi million pound industry when anyone with a pair of friendly braincells knows the basic truth that if you eat less and exercise more, you’ll live longer.

You may not even lose weight but it’ll be distributed in such a way that you stop giving off the shifty impression you’re attempting to smuggle a bowling ball in your stomach lining. I’m not being fattest here, I’m just trying to inject a sense of reality into the extremes of so called professional advice on offer. At one end you’ve got those fat fucks (ok I’m being fattest now, it’s not like you can outrun me) who can barely walk a mile without keeling over and damaging the earth’s mantle, and at the other the body Nazi’s to whom a microgram of fat is analogous to anthrax.

If we’re going to chuck around worthless statistics and pointless diets, then let me add this; well known fact that below the age of thirty most of us have hummingbird metabolisms and can eat and drink our own bodyweight daily with non trouser shopping required. Hit thirty one, wake up, you’re a fat bastard. If that’s a body shape you’re comfortable with then you’re entitled to tell anyone who smokes, drinks or partakes in recreational pharmaceuticals to mind their own bloody business. Otherwise, do something, anything but don’t subscribe to the stupidity that is diet marketing. And don’t blame big bones or the ruthless buggers that tempt you with burgers/chocolate/crisps at every turn.

Oops, turned into a bit of a righteous tirade that did. And that’s pretty hypocritical as I’m hardly the perfect physical specimen what with a fluid intake that’s basically hops lightened up with a splash of water. My own advice would suggest cutting out the beer and instead getting down with the abdominal crunch crowd.

But now you’re just being silly. And that’s my job.

Mud in your eye.

On By AlexIn Bikes, Mountain Bike Riding, Other stuff3 Comments

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”.

What the hell was that..

On By AlexIn Bikes, Road Riding2 Comments

… that, my friends, was the sound of Winter rushing in early to claim squatters rights in Autumn’s house. Somebody clearly told the planet about global warming since the local response has been to dump about thirteen degrees from the ambient temperature and ice frost onto every flat surface.

My pre-ride analysis of the weather could be summarised thus:”Cold and Clear, good. Minus one, loss of feeling in extremities, bad“. Not quite sure which expensive winter specific cycle clothing to don, I simply wore it all. The first five minutes were still really quite unpleasant, as a chilling northerly sought out and froze any uncovered skin. Since this included my nose and ears, a frantic gloved rearrangement of apparel bolted the stable door but the horse was gone. It also gave me the appearance of a vagrant, festooned as I was with all manner of inappropriate extremity warmers

Dog walkers hastily crossed the street with a desperately whispered “Stay away from that man Zoe, he’s got a handkerchief on his head and a pair of spare gloves taped to his nose”. All that was missing was a shopping trolley and a can of Special Brew.

But cold muscles finally cranked sufficient revolutions to start the body furnace, and a lovely warmth spread across my body and brought a smile to cracked lips. Amazingly clever really; feeling a bit hot, just back off the pedals, now a bit cold? Just leg crank the bellows for a minute and toastiness will return. I was put in mind of Val Doonican, a warm fire and a very poorly chosen jumper.

It’ll be less fun in the dark going home. Warm train to cold platform is something that’s giving me panic attacked flashbacks to last winter. I would have taken the car this morning but I really couldn’t be arsed to defrost it. That task was undertaken about twenty minutes later on my testicles, through the almost forgotten art of a vigorous crotch rub. Still we don’t want any more kids, or, come to that, people to sit next to me on the train.

If it’s this cold now, then summer must just be around the corner. That’s right isn’t it?

Okay he DID try to kill me..

On By AlexIn Bikes, Road Riding9 Comments

.. but then he did sort of apologise. So that’s alright then.

No, actually, it bloody isn’t. Riding past the exact same spot where some old fella parked his Mercedes on my nose this time last year, this guy gave the give way a miss and instead tried to hit me. Well, to be fair, he wasn’t really trying as his attention was focussed on the far more important mobile phone conversation he was having.

“Yeah sorry Nigel, just drove clean through this cyclist, he’s still moving tho so once I’ve cleared his broken body from under my wheels, we’ll do lunch, yeah? Have your people call my people, Capish?”

Had I not taken radical avoiding action involving a traffic island and a sharp intake of breath, they’d have been blood on the tarmac. As I swung in an ever widening arc to avoid the front of his one handed cavalier entrance to the Mall, he finally noticed either my concerned gesticulations or spluttering vernacular.

“Sorry mate, didn’t see you there” he offered in spite of my plethora of lights and reflective clothing. I look like a mobile gas excavation and possibly smell a little like one too after this morning’s one second shower. I had sufficient breath left to quietly explain that if he wouldn’t mind “putting his fucking phone down and looking where he was sodding well going” this may never have happened.

“Oh if that’s your bloody attitude then mate, you can fuck off“. Just to be clear, this anti-apology was from Mr. Knobhead. Yes I was wronged but he still felt he was right – personality defect or caring new century?

He roared off in a frenzy of tyre smoke and testosterone leaving me wondering if apologies speak louder than actions. After grudgingly saying sorry, he couldn’t believe that I’d still be upset – after all, he’d not actually killed me only had a damn good attempt.

World’s gone mad. Time to leave the planet.

5 go mad in wales

On By AlexIn Bikes, Mountain Bike RidingLeave a comment

That’s Frank, Jay, Jason, Nigel, Alex and Timmy the spare liver. We’ll be frolicking around in mid wales with lashings of ginger beer later. In between there may be some riding over glacial remains of high valleys, thousand year old peat bogs and recently crashed mountain bikers. It will look a little like this:

Dry Wales. Not tomorrow

Only not really because the forecast talks of other types of precipitational lashings which may raise the water table slightly over the height of the trails. Never mind, expensive waterproofs and medical insurance should cover most of the bases.

And we musn’t go down the “hidden mechanical, faked injury, tea and cake all day” riding denial, as the Antipodean in our midst has already spotted entire flocks of sheep dressed as,er, lambs and is worryingly excited over the prospect of meeting them.

If at the foot of a descent, there is no sign of him, I expect the following conversation to ensue: “Has Jason Crashed? Nah, he’s pulled”

Assuming there is some improvement in the weather and Jason’s not been arrested, we’ll be off here on Sunday:

Oooh.....

There may be some skills on show if any proper riders turn up, otherwise Photoshop offers the valid alternative.

Before we leave this evening, I need to fix my bike. It barely works now but history suggests, it’ll work even less once I’ve crafted deep wounds with edged power tools. Probably best to leave it alone.

They’re at it like rabbits.

On By AlexIn Bikes, Mountain Bike Riding3 Comments

Well jumping bunnies anyway. Bunny Hops? Make sense? No? Never mind, only took me ten minutes to think it up.

I appear to have unwittingly signed up to a skills timeshare. Some poor sod has been saddled “ or possibly unsaddled “ with two weeks of crashing and excuses while first trackstands and now bunny-hops have been enjoying an autumnal holiday round my place. I’m concerned that soon he’s going to want those skills back.

However, in the meantime, I could best be described as insufferably smug. For veterans (and I thank you for your continued support in this ˜care in the electronic community‘ project) of this blog, you’ll be well familiar with the ground state of self parody. I like to get in there first so to speak, but also the crushing embarrassment of ever pretending I was any good at, well, anything rightly kills boasting at source. And yet this time a feeling of smugness remains; it’ll all end in tears of course, and probably injury, ridicule and humiliation at the feet of complete strangers. Well, that’s something to look forward to.

In the meant time – bunny-hops, a skill almost anyone with a bike and a single digit age has long perfected. Extremely useful for clearing obstacles such as curbs, logs and vertically challenged pedestrians. It’s only taken me a year to perfect, not one, but three special adaptations of the traditional style. On approaching the obstacle, either:

1: The front wheel remains stubbornly glued to pavement despite spirited grunting, whilst momentum speeds it effortlessly to hit the obstacle square on. The rider instantly dismounts frontwards to hit square concrete some painful distance away.

OR:

2: The front clears the obstacle leaving, this time, the rear to spend quality time at ground level. Inevitably this wheel clips the obstacle in a pacy, vertebrae crushing manner. See adaptation 1: for likely ending.

OR as happens most often:

3: The front rises, like an arthritic elephants trunk, to an epic six inches. A desperate forward lunge unweights the rear sufficiently for it to scrape over the obstacle. The bike then drops vertically hitting the ground to the sound of screaming components and ankles. Around 50{45ac9c3234d371044e23e276755ef3a4dde8f1068375defba7d385ca3cd4deb2} of this adaptation finish with the rider lying on the pavement demanding hospitalisation for broken limbs.

This has become somewhat vexing so advice was sought from the anti-grav crowd; Get it up and keep it up” was offered and, while we’re good friends, this felt a little personal. But keep it up I must, so my bunny-hop Viagra was a pedal scooping arc joined by a committed spring backwards raising the front a frighteningly high distance from terra firma.

Once the wheel is scrabbling for the moon, a somewhat lewd rotation of wrists and a retraction of lower limbs unsticks the rear. If you like a righteous life, it will lift and you will fly.

New super light weight helmetRacing CarsThe curse of photoshop strikes againBrad. Too much better than me

Okay it’s not the 12 inch high obstacle I was aiming to clear; in fact it’s barely 9 inches and it’s been a while since I’ve been able to feel disappointed with that but, compared to playing urban concrete head tennis, it’s progress of a sort.

It as Arthur C. Clarke’s third law states Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic“. It feels magic, well until the morning brings a spasming back, blistered hands and aching shoulders. Practically identical symptoms to a night of of extreme and possibly illegal animal husbandry while some of the grunting is common.

So I think the irritated looking pedestrians got off quite lightly, considering. On that note tho, I am now officially a two trick pony.

Highway Robbery

On By AlexIn Bikes, Other stuff1 Comment

Oh this is good. A graphical representation of how different modes of transport take up road space. Fella called Guy Chapman who makes the kind of rationale arguments I tend to summarise with “get stuffed you bloody idiot”
Clicky here

I still think the bus in the last photo would be duty bound to run over one of the cyclists tho.

He kind of wrote some good stuff about the standard cycling myths that get shouted out of outraged cagers’ windows most days. Saves me having to try and put it any better.

Still on the downside, he does have a bit of a dodgy tash.

The art of not falling over.

On By AlexIn Bikes, Mountain Bike Riding1 Comment

An art “ you would have thought – as distanced from me as are crayoned scrawls to Monet. Recent history shows me on medication more often than on the bike, and frequent trips to the doctors, the hospital and the shrubbery do little to detract from this picture.

However, if at first you don’t succeed, merely redefine your success criteria. In this case rather than falling off at speed, I’ve seamlessly transplanted my skills to falling off more slowly. Remember my street riding experience being frustrated by an inability to enter the world of string and wires? A world where gravity is optional and graceful slow speed exits from high places end with the merest waft of a landing rear tyre. Not my world, I’m barely even a jealous orbiting moon.

Oh I can slam dunk a few bunnyhops before the inevitable pinchflat. I’ve been known to ride slowly off walls although heard is probably a better adjective. It’s like an aerobatic stall turn without the turn as my nose, navigating a heading due south, plunges groundwards to land at expensive dentistry. Saved only so many times by big forks and the power of chance “ it was time to shape up or, more likely, give up.

Good advice is something I find easy to ignore but in this case, the simple instruction to start small and work up made perfect sense. Although I’ve generally been a start small and work down kind of guy until now. The base of many gravitationally illegal moves is centred around balance, but since my inner ear only talks to my other balance centres through lawyers, I’ve favoured gyroscopic effect over stationary magic.

And yet the simplest balancing skill is the track stand; where your bike remains almost motionless at zero miles per hour. You’ve probably seen stationary bike couriers supping coffee and rolling fags while their bike sits under them like a favourite armchair. If you noticed a bloke rolling randomly forward and backward, grabbing first brakes then a legful of crank before falling into the gutter, then that was me. Thanks for your sardonic applause.

A very brave man, Trackstanding Falling over here. Very bad indeed.

First lesson, no brakes. Roll to a stop using a slope to still momentum and then engage 23rd century anti-grav. If that isn’t available, shove front wheel one way and hips (they mean arse, come on be honest here, it’s a big counterbalancing body part and should be used appropriately) the other. Rock gently forward and back on the pedals and marvel at staying level rather than crashing to ground level.

Obviously it took me a while. Well about 30 years since riding first entered my life but concentrating so hard on a monster 45 second trackstand, I didn’t notice a dog walking couple in awe of my skills. Until he uttered from about two feet away I wonder how he does that“. I was by this time chewing berries in the verge as my trials status came to an unplanned and abrupt end. They wandered away looking over their shoulder, proud to have been present at the inaugural fakie track stand to holly bush, extreme swearing to finish“

Flushed with success, a flowing coasting manual followed which promptly dumped me on my counterbalancing body part. That’s the problem with gravity, it waits for a moment of boastful overconfidence and hurls you onto your arse.

Life mirroring art? Life mirroring gravity more like.