Category: Words

My usual commuting route into work has been out of action for the last few weeks as a group of workmen sip tea, read The Sun in the front seat of their transits, wolf whistle and ogle at attractive young female students and piss into a hole that has meant that Upper Brook Street in Manchester is closed to inbound traffic.

As a result of the other alternative routes being particularly unfavourable, I have been running the gauntlet along Europes busiest bus route, Oxford Road. The irony in this is it actually has a pretty good provision for bikes in the form of a dedicated bus lane that runs from the top of the Curry Mile in Rusholme right into the city centre. Unfortunately this route is for quite large sections shared with buses and runs through heart of the University campus.

This means as well as dealing with mobile alley ways between buses and cars there is the added thrill of taxi drivers taking ‘shortcuts to nowhere’ and students in various states and combinations of being: high on drugs/drunk/hungover/ipod’d/late for lectures. This of course means that each year there are generally at least two fatalities and many other serious injuries as people discover the implications of being hit by several tons of Magic Bus. NCAP tests for pedestrian safety don’t seem to extend to buses, least not the diesel belching death traps that shuttle the nations finest to our World Class institution. If you get hit by one of these bad boys you’re not going to be getting up.

Over the last few weeks even riding the white line between the two lines of traffic hasn’t been enough to escape near death experiences. I have discovered that:

1. The exocet missile properties of taxis in relation to taking out cyclists is that they think they rule the road and that everyone should get out of their way. Even if you’re in the right, by their book you’re in the wrong. Even if you do catch them up at the next set of lights you have to face the language barrier of communication, be it Polish, Afghan or Mancunian.

2. You can’t trust anyone to watch where they’re going. Ever. It’s every person for themselves.

Onwards to today. Coming down to the Precinct Centre next to Manchester Computing heading into town. Line of about five buses in the bike/bus/taxi lane dropping people off at a bus stop and a queue of stationary traffic in the other lane. I’m gunning it down the outside of both on the white line and a pedestrian emerges from in front of a van, doesn’t look and steps out into my path.

It’s amazing even when you’re on the hoods how much ground you cover before your reactions let you hit the brakes and you start to sloooowwww doooowwwwwnnnn. Weight back off the saddle. Front brake is full on and the steering is going squiffy. The call of “Whoa!” sounds like it’s being said over the space of a minute, The girl turns, possible clocking a blob of bright orange out of the corner of her eye hurtling towards her. She turns, stops, starts to step back…

It’s all too late I’m right next to her. Lean to the right outwards into the oncoming traffic. Catch her with my left arm. Feel it run over her, then ‘Thwack!’ Folowed by ‘Ooomph!’ and the sound of teeth as my shoulder makes contact with her chin and sends her head sideways.

A quick look back over the shoulder and she’s still standing. A call of ‘Sorry’ follows from her and is responded to with an ‘Are you okay?’, but she’s already turned and started to make her way across the road to the otherside. That was close.

I often wonder what goes through people minds as you over take them as they sit there in their cars in nose to tail traffic. The fact that you see the same people sitting their day after day as they burn petrol (read money) and inhaling diesel fumes seems odd. Maybe they enjoy it? Am I missing some perverse thrill?

Clearly the fact that they’d get where they’re going a lot quicker if they were on two wheels, might actually benefit from it health wise and would be part of the solution – not the problem – hasn’t quite registered yet. Maybe they need some education Cars’R’Coffins style.

And don’t get me started on the number of people who are in the cars on their own. Bring on congestion charging that’s what I say. I think the general understanding of the term ‘car pool’ isn’t the socially responsible act of sharing transport with friends and colleagues, rather the conceptual movement led by Keith Moon and more recently Clarkson.

Just under three years ago Conradski and I loaded up the car and on a crisp and snowy day at the end of February ventured out into the Derbyshire Dales south of Buxton to ride. An updated photo gallery from the original trip into the Peak District’s White Peak area can now be found on this page.

This weekend Tyrrell and I returned to revisit the same route and this time didn’t get anywhere near as lost or exhausted. The mud on the route over the top’o’the quarries wasn’t nearly as deadly, the trails weren’t buried beneath snow and we had the luxury of sunshine from the start of the ride until the end. More photos in the gallery.

Not posted for a while, which does mean I have the advantage of a whole heap of things to post that have accumulated in my inbox. Remember all those TV shows you enjoyed at the time and then forgot all about? Well it looks like someone has taken the time to actually compile a fairly comprehensive summary of them all. Check out Retrojunk for your reminder of Street Hawk, Manimal and Airwolf and just how dated they are now – they’ve even managed to find Tales of the Golden Monkey. Ace!

From: Tyrrell
Subject: These are pretty funny
HOW MEN AND WOMEN DIFFER

NICKNAMES
* If Laura, Kate and Sarah go out for lunch, they will call each other Laura, Kate and Sarah.
* If Mike, Dave and John go out, they will affectionately refer to each other as Fat Boy, Godzilla and Four-eyes.

EATING OUT
* When the bill arrives, Mike, Dave and John will each throw in R50, even though it’s only for R115.50. None of them will have anything smaller and none will actually admit they want change back.
* When the girls get their bill, out come the pocket calculators.

MONEY
* A man will pay R2 for a R1 item he needs.
* A woman will pay R1 for a R2 item that she doesn’t need but it’s on sale

BATHROOMS
* A man has six items in his bathroom: toothbrush and toothpaste, shaving cream, razor, a bar of soap, and a towel from Dischem.
* The average number of items in the typical woman’s bathroom is 337. A man would not be able to identify more than 20 of these items.

ARGUMENTS
* A woman has the last word in any argument.
* Anything a man says after that is the beginning of a new argument.

CATS
* Women love cats.
* Men say they love cats, but when women aren’t looking, men kick cats.

FUTURE
* A woman worries about the future until she gets a husband.
* A man never worries about the future until he gets a wife.

SUCCESS
* A successful man is one who makes more money than his wife can spend.
* A successful woman is one who can find such a man.

MARRIAGE
* A woman marries a man expecting he will change, but he doesn’t.
* A man marries a woman expecting that she won’t change, but she does.

DRESSING UP
* A woman will dress up to go shopping, water the plants, empty the bins, answer the phone, read a book, and get the post.
* A man will dress up for weddings and funerals.

NATURAL
* Men wake up as good-looking as they went to bed.
* Women somehow deteriorate during the night.

OFFSPRING
* Ah, children. A woman knows all about her children. She knows about dentist appointments and romances, best friends, favourite foods, secret-fears and hopes and dreams.
* A man is vaguely aware of some short people living in the house.

THOUGHT FOR THE DAY
* Any married man should forget his mistakes. There’s no use in two people remembering the same thing.

* What a woman says: C’mon…This place is a mess. You and I need to clean. Your trousers are on the floor and you’ll have no clothes if we don’t do the laundry now.
* What a man hears: C’MON … blah, blah, blah YOU AND I blah, blah, blah, blah, blah ON THE FLOOR blah, blah, blah, NO CLOTHES blah, blah, blah, blah, NOW

Can you relate to any of that?

From: Catia
Subject: Mailbox

Why don’t you get a postbox like this?

Oh and that little race in South Africa? Well things are getting a little hot in the Port Elizabeth area. Tyrrell says this news report is talking about the shopping Mall he used to go to all the time.

This is pretty neat although not as flexible as it could be in terms of being able to customise it to fit into websites. I’ve added it to the sidebar in the racing section of the website. If you still haven’t dug deep to sponsor us, please feel free to do so now.

There’s lots of stuff on you tube including a few biking videos. This one is particularly interesting if you stick it out to the end, because in all honesty the beginning is quite dull.

This one’s for Jed and Tyrrell. A bunch of guys down at the rifle range with a .577 T-Rex rifle, which it seems has quite a kick. Watch these people make fools of themselves trying to shoot it. Remember even Commandos need to pick their LZs carefully. Sarge! We’re pinned down and we can’t move!

For the followers of world politics, remember George W Bush was accepted into Yale University, where he received a Bachelor of Arts degree in history in 1968. Here’s a video montage of the president of the most powerful country in the world in action.

Finally Travis Pastrana is one crazy mo’fo. That’s a double back flip off a kicker on his second run on a motocross bike. Skills to pay the bills for sure.

Met up with Neil and Lardy again this morning an Neil’s mate Dave who lives just down the road from me was out for a ride too. Out of Marple and over to the Goyt Valley for a five hour ride in the hills with well over 1,100m of climbing.

It was a great day out with clear blue skies and a chilly start disappeared as we warmed up. After a hearty lunch outside the Beehive Inn, we headed up and over to Whaley Bridge and then motorwayed it along the canal back to Marple.

Unfortunately for Dave, he was riding a bit close behind me and wasn’t really on the ball. Head down an focused he clipped a branch on the towpath and went for a brief and cold swim in the canal. Brrrr. Time to up it a couple of gears and get home quick.

Today was the first proper ride of the year. The daily commute into work just doesn’t cut it as a proper ride. It’s just a fairly monotonous and dull route into work that is only made more interesting by the attempts of motorists to add another kill marking to the wing of their car. This weeks special was an elderly chinese woman driving a Skoda saloon whose inability to hold her line on a round about almost but me into the Armco.

The plan was to meet up with Tyrrell and ride the river run out past Reddish Vale and then to stop of at the Jodhpur Café for a brew and a bacon and mushroom sandwich before riding home. It was decided that 10am was a fair time to meet so, this morning I left home about 9.30am and span over to our meeting spot near Jackson’s Boat on the banks of the Mersey.

After waiting for half an hour it was clear that some fate had befallen my riding partner and today was going to be a solo run. The river run is to the uninitiated a fairly uninteresting route. Over the last five or six years improvement by the local councils have only served to eliminate any of the interesting bits of singletrack by making them into ‘proper’ trails or by passing them altogether and them falling into disrepair. It’s an undeniably flat for the majority of it’s length, although there are a few little rises over spurs in the river valley if you venture up and off the rivers double levees.

It was on today’s ride over one of these small rises that I managed to run over a dog. Not some little terrier, but a full on sheepdog. The owners were it seems just about to launch a tennis ball for it and in anticipation the canine was belting it full tilt down the trail looking behind it to identify the moment of launch. Unfortunately the hurtling hound found itself to be wedged under the front wheel of the singlespeed seconds later and was obviously completely startled by the whole thing. A brief chat with the owners followed in which we joked about the whole thing after checking out the dog was okay. It certainly seemed to have learned its lesson as on the way back it cowered behind the walkers as I went past.

Shortly after this there is a break in the riverbank where there is a concrete structure that houses an automated hydraulic sluice gate. This is opened during bank full conditions to flood a designated area of wasteland and golf courses to prevent flooding down stream. During the summer this is generally dry and dusty and you can whiz down it through the bottom and with enough speed going in you can generally pop a bit of air off the top on the way out.

After scoping it out from above, I anticipated that it might be a bit wet and in the past it has generally been a bit sketchy after rain so I went in reasonably quick, but not at a warp factor that would be launching me skyward on exit. Big mistake. The floor of the channel was covered in well over a foot of alluvial mud and as my front wheel rapidly disappeared into the mire I began to panic, for as the hub went under I knew what was coming next. Air time, but of the unwanted kind. Over the bars and smack down into the mud. Boy did that stuff smell. Euurrgh.

So I carried on and went as far as Ye Olde Woolpack in Stockport. It seems Smith Knight Fay have relocated their Stockport Dealership, so caked in mud and armed with the Indy Fab I went over to scout it out. Sure enough they had the new S3 in stock, a pretty mean looking black thing. All it needed was the bucket seats…
Having received some funny looks from the staff I took the hint and headed home. The rear tyre had picked up a puncture, but it was slow enough just to have generated that slight bobbing sensation you get as the tyre starts to soften and then squirm around the corners. Given the amount of drift debris on the river banks the puncture wasn’t really unexpected, but feeling cold by this point I decided that I would just pump it up and change it at home later.

After crossing the Cheadle Road and passing the health club, there is a small section of woodland. A ribbon of singletrack runs through this parallel to the more recent pushchair buggy trail and in my mind it’s a must. There are a few fallen trees along it that you have to duck under, one of which is particularly low and a real limbo job. I’d failed to clean it on the way out and was determined to give it ago on the way back.

Check the speed. Check the angle of approach to get maximum headroom. Off the saddle crouched down to one side of the bike as low as I can go. Entry. We’re through…Yay…Whhhoooaaa….WTF?….Oooommmph. Down like a sack of spuds. That’ll be mistake number too then. Seems the backpack caught on the tree and flipped me off the back of the bike and hit me down flat on my back like some wrestling move. Damn I really should learn. Trees don’t move.

Went and played “Big Screen Bingo” on Tuesday night at the Trafford Centre’s Odeon. It was a pilot for a system setup by Blue Dog Inc. I must admit that I wasn’t too enthusiastic about the suggestion to go, but in retrospect it tunred out to be a great night out and fairly good entertainment. In honesty I have to say scooping £100 in prizes including the only full house of the night was an added bonus and may have gone some way to the ‘that was good’ view on things. I’d definitely go again.

Is there a reason that people choose to ride to work in the middle of winter? Today one word describes tonights commute home in the cold wet rain and grime: Grim. Still there’s always the possibility that tomorrow will be better and it is training isn’t it?

The George Bush & Son design is available in a fetching women’s t-shirt design and most appropriate kitchen/workshop apron from the Hemp Trading Company down in Bristol, along with other modern classics like Smoke Bush, Not Afghan. I like their Statue of Terror design too.