John's Tour de Force

Have the wheels come off your company pension fund?

2007-01-17T02:13:00.000-08:00

Somebody must think I’m a nutter…. like they want me to go out and buy a unicycle, then learn to ride it and join a mass protest.

I ought to say no, no and no. Go away on all three scores, only this a protest about pensions and it's right outside Parliament and it’s in the summer and…. it's coming from a construction firm.

The message behind this summons-to-madness, sent by a pair of 50-somethings Gerry and Fran, and no, that’s not their waistline measurements, is that pensions in the private sector are dire (I agree, well in part) … and in some construction firms they either worrying or abysmal (I again agree, well in part).

But…you, dear reader, might actually be more vociferous than me on this one, so how about a deal? Like you can take my part and do the one-wheel-wobble stint while I’ll hive off to France on two wheels instead. See, I already have a plan. So deal done?

In the office, Erroll is being a pain.

He’s eliminating my get-out clause, like telling me that they cost next-to-nothing on eBay. We’re talking unicycles. Cheap enough even for me. I pretend I can’t hear so what does he do? He comes round and gets right it on up my screen and forces my hand.

Erroll has this a gold-plated card (commonly known as a sucker account) on eBay as in the space of a quarterly phone bill he has bought 43 wooden sheds (all bargains, but 12 with no doors) , 19 bikes (three intact) (almost), 12 oboes (the result of a typing mistake) and a wind-sock (shhhh…but that was entered by Julius and me one lunchtime when we were on our own and in prank mode)

The steam engine (built in Inverurie) has been sent back.

Thanks to Erroll I now have five live bids running (apparently). I can see me ending with five unicycles. Only they are all potential bargains, so I’m told. But I don’t want five bargains. Get them off. My protest goes unheeded and so next news I’m being offered a really cheap shed, it has three lapboard sides, to put them in.

It’s in Upperthong, in the hills behind Hunddersfield, so there’s the chance of a visit to that lap dancer cousin we know. No wonder Erroll is offering to come and help me collect it.

The Tour de Force was supposed to be the end to this madness stuff. But look, I’ve never been on a mass protest. I’ve never been in a pensions protest. I’ve never been on a uni-cycle.

But it would be nice to join in.

So perhaps I’ll spread the load, issue a challenge to someone. Who's mad enough? Mmmm, well Johnny I-have-more-horses-than-bikes Wates comes to mind….if he does it then I will.

Perhaps we could even ride as a trio with cyclist-of-repute Adam Shutkever, Accord’s finance director, making up the team. Are you listening Adam??

Is it all just Midlands madness? No, not at all. These people at Polyblox Construction in Queslett, Gerry and Fran, see it like this…..the wheels have been coming off company pension schemes, one by one, so that they’re now pretty much like a unicycle, rolling round the last-chance saloon and in danger of crashing to a total halt altogether.

So what could be more appropriate than a mass protest outside Parliament on one-wheeled transport. There is a logic, you must agree.

Plus there’s this paradox....like all the mounting worries are all in the private sector. Gerry and Fran are fuming at having to have to cough up £900 a year to fund gold-plated public sector pensions when they’re in such a mess elsewhere/on the home front.

Polyblox of Queslett only needs to go bust (it was well in the red two years ago when a client put itself into liquidation in order to not pay) and they’d be in a pickle as their pension fund is under-funded big-time. Like past management funded golf tournaments OK but let the pension pot boil close-to-dry.

The cost of inflation-linked pension schemes for six million state employees such as doctors, nurses, teachers and policemen has climbed to £22bn. Whose going to pay for that? Julius here says the only answer is more breeding. He’s keen to play his part. His offers have so far been turned down.

This is all planned for June 21, like the longest day. The cycling, that is, not the breeding.

Back in our office, Edward Scissorhands has a new personal bank. Coutts. Split-pea wants to know if they lick your boots.

The Speckled Hen, now a legend in her own time, has had a breathless encounter with a pre-op transexual. We’re talking of a car prang of medium seriousness.

Out pops the other driver, pink jeans and all. Only the closer-up version was a curious combination of both stubble and breasts. And with a voice like Lee Marvin. Well, we can’t all be a wandering star. But OK, lets try a wandering car. Head on or side impact?

Split-pea has applied to become a barnwinkle. He’s told me in strict confidence. The rest off the office deny their existence, you see. Only I know one. A barnwinkle. He’s in PR. He's rude when I phone. It's lovely.

The tinitis gets no better, in fact it gets worse. It’s never ending. I thought the entire world was marching over gravel yesterday only it was Julius eating a bag of crisps without taking them out of the bag. In a previous life, I think the man must have been a raccoon.

Someone read about my trick of getting grand-daughter, 11-month old Beth, climbing up windows on all-fours, well with hands and feet stuck into slices of malt-loaf. Like on suction pads. It’s all the rage in playgroups in Reigate now, I’m advised. A caller asked which brand is best. I’ve asked Tintin to undertake trials.

Erroll is coming round holding up a bunch of fingers. Five. Oh no. I think my bids have come up trumps.

Gravy can be hoovered.... but Polarity fails to attract

2007-01-04T07:39:00.000-08:00

I was hoping some memorable quote might surface during the Christmas fun-run. Just for you.

Only serious verbal abuse was in short supply until Alex, dearest daughter’s boyfriend of some length of time now, best measured in terms of one garden and one kitchen upgrade, said his family were alcoholics while our side were nutters.

That was nice. I got the better bottle of red wine out at that point and poured him a liberal splash.

Nicky’s dad (and the “other” grandfather to the tiny offspring Beth) is a professor. He specialises in secondary metabolism. Puts me to shame. I tried to understand but he went hiving off after mulled wine. He’s also an expert on fungi.

I had a walk with Vic and Alex. We sprang across a row of slippery stepping stones, beating quite an aggressive river flow, and went hiving off up Box Hill in some style until the huffing triggered a stop and that triggered more of the Ray Mears stuff. I’m a bit worried at what these people know.

Last time it was King Alfred's Cakes.... this time it’s Jews' ears. Fingers pointed and I’m looking at them all round a tree trunk. Brown silky sprouts of decay. They suggest I have some. Whole. In soup. I again think about re-writing my will. I just don’t have confidence in this dodgy mushroom and fungus stuff.

Another time we shot about 50 Canadian geese on the River Mole and traded them with a Romanian guy, well Hana the Serbian sniper did. I’m just a middleman. He knows a restaurant in Kingston-on-Thames. You’d not believe it but four days later there was as many again flying in and scoffing the decent grass.

The gravy got spilt on Christmas Day. All over the table and close on a riot ensued. Luckily, I was able to grab little Beth, now all of 11 months old, and hold her out and run her mouth over it, like Hoover-fashion, before it poured on the carpet. She smiled. Little treasure.

If the relations from up Huddersfield got wind of that, like us spilling gravy, we’d have them northern hordes down here, exacting punishment.

I was telling Ron, cyclist, about that family wedding up in Yorkshire, in the hills behind Holmfirth back in the summer. This was at the reception and we were already laughing at nothing and several knew this absent-but-parallel family. How people go different ways – there’s a daughter who’s ticking full on brainpower and she’s at Girton College, Oxford, while her cousin is spinning her fortune as a lap dancer.

She lives in Upperthong. I didn’t think that was at all funny but Ron almost fell off his bike.

He needed a chuckle. His son Les has separated from Liz and their three kids. So what’s he done now….set up with someone new called Liz who has four kids. What a swap… three of yours for four of hers. Deal or no deal.

Ron senses trouble. The new squadra live temporarily in this protected house as there was beating involved beforehand. I must see if Erroll has some spare sheds ready to download from eBay.

The weather was so bad one day over Christmas that I left the bike indoors and went out walking with Hazel. There we were in big boots, waterproof trousers, all buttoned down, me with the trademark umbrella struggling to stay up there in the elements.

We bludgeoned along, over a little path across the railway line south of Homewood and then squelched into this field, a sea of mud and water and a few remnant splashes of yellow stubble of a well-gone crop of wheat. Could anyone else be this mad?

Well yes actually….. there was this guy in the field in shorts. Playing golf. Well practicing hits and with a daft dog doing the retrievals.

Then up the hill a bit, onto firmer stuff like a farm track and here it comes…..dibble, dibble, dibble…. and there’s this splendid weasel crossing right in front of our noses.

We have a domestic argument brewing over snails. I like them. Only this time I’m not the one at the receiving end, no, it’s the neighbours. Their snails are crawling into us. Not just that but they are “foreign snails”. I’m intrigued by the “foreign” tag but don’t like to show it.

Uncle Festa has been having trouble with his eye. The second cornea was a good one as it was from a younger man in America, but it’s not settled and the poor stitching is giving him jip. He’s been back to hospital to have it ironed down.

I thought that when we were in Belgium in August for the big race last summer, a high point of my year, that I came bottom of the class. Only we got the results published in the post last week.

I was 51st and sure enough that made me the lowest-placed English rider. I expected that. Still, doing a world championships at all is something to be happy about, to my way of thinking.

But what I spotted, or should I say didn’t spot, was Uncle Festa. Nine names in all from England but his was totally missing. I’d had my suspicions all along, that he nipped in to see the Chinese nurse in the First Aid tent not after the race ended but while the rest of us were still in battle.

Mind you it really was a battle. I know you’ll scoff when I say this, but I got dropped three times when we went over…… a speed hump.

There was only one such hump per lap, thank goodness, and sure enough I got back on. Three times. But the fourth time I didn’t.

It had been criterium-style racing from the gun and I was on the rack at every corner, but I never expected to get blown out on such a pimple. I mean I went up the Galibier this summer and the Croix de Fer and the Col du Mollard.

Back at work now and the customary greeting of barn-pots.

The Speckled Hen tried to clone herself on New Year’s Eve. Seems that there was this scam being pulled on the cash machine in Leatherhead and in/out went her card and the cloners got to work only the good news was that the scam had been running for two days already and the bank were snaffling everything up. So that was close.

Bex and Buttons are both under orders to come to yoga. Not my orders. Exactly whose orders is not clear. Also Rob Roy, back from a New Year camping spree in the carrot fields around The Wash (I worry about that boy), has announced that he too is to become a yoga-toga. Good grief, we’ll all be playing statues next. Like in the break-out zone.

Happily, our chunk-stay Christmas feeders moved out after two days with half the Christmas pudding intact. I had it under guard. Still have and if any foreign snail should come within five paces the little slim-rider will be…..posted off to Skelmanthorpe.

However they (or you) could be reprieved if they (you) can show me how to play Polarity.

It was to be my Christmas party-piece. New game. Award-winning game in fact according to the spread in the Daily Telegraph. I love games so this was to be a treat. Only it wasn’t. It was a washout, we couldn’t work out the rules.

I mean I couldn’t work out the rules. So Alex took them out of my hand. Only that got us no further, which made me feel a bit better, so I poured him some more of the wine. Nice boy.

New Year come, New Year gone…. that means my interval training sessions get harder.

Out go the 60-sec type and in come the 30-sec ones…. so more watts and less recovery. January can be so painful.

Thank goodness there’s the axed-off Christmas pud left and a few cans of Guinness hidden behind the sofa. Well, unless either our foreign snails or Hoover-bird Beth got there on their crawls.

Best get a’gait.

SAS rations crumble on my knee as the dogs of war get high on cannabis

2006-12-14T06:21:00.000-08:00

I’m driving fast and talking big mouthfuls, heading west from London, for Wales and the Newport Velodrome, my own track bike and one other stacked in the back. My passenger is full of news. I’m hooked, I’m into fascination mode.

I do love these magic moments when something totally unexpected and interesting hits you, lifts you above your anticipated swirl.

I’m not paying eye attention down there, but my man has just slid something onto my left knee. I’m doing 90. Oops, consider that a misprint, officer. It’s one of his sandwiches. He’s well prepared. He always carries food, he says, as a result of having been in the SAS. The what!!

Well, we’ll have to come back to that but first, the practice zone. Isn’t someone else’s private life interesting? You know, when you can put your nose in and wiggle.

His mother - and we’re talking about an 88-year-old here - has just downsized from a house with too-big grounds into something much smaller. The difference runs to £900,000 and I’m thinking wow. Mother’s plan is for the dosh to be halved but sister’s plan is to pocket the lot.

Really, as a tight-fisted Yorkshireman, I should be gobsmacked by the money layer on all this, but strangely I’m not on too much alert there…. rather the vision of the sister’s chase for the lot.

So I switch into NLP-mode (you’ll hear lots of that from now on). I need to practice my NLP. How much detail will he comfortably give me? How can I ask the right questions and have a good delve?

Those parts of the sandwich safe inside me are fine, only much of the crumbly bread keeps rolling off my leg, like in little torrents, in a two-sided peeling off at every bump, down into the deep-below where I seldom look. I got most of the ham though.

He’s a charmer with a refined voice, basking through life as a former Rotary Club chap would. In fact I’m getting everything by way of signals that doesn’t square at all with him being in the SAS.

Come on there, stop dithering……NLP…it’s Neuro Linguistic Programming.

I can’t laugh. Hey I didn’t know even when the surprise book first arrived and I was looking at the cover and it was there in big letters. NLP. It took Maria David to explain. She was on the phone. She was just a cyclist until that moment, she having this insight into psychology was a big surprise.

I set myself a challenge, despite the speed and all, of extracting something stunningly revealing about what the SAS do. But I suspect that he set himself the counter-challenge of skidding me round the edges in tantalising fashion. All done with such charm.

His time round, the SAS applicants ran to 360, including numerous burly gymnastic guys, the sort you imagine to be already secretly running amok out there on our behalf.

By the end of the elimination process just 32 got through. And the burly buys? No, all gone. They bought it during the session to assess mental resistance when under interrogation.

That’s it. I can’t get much more….other than a laugh. They were in mid-Wales, see, on an exercise. Driven to the middle of nowhere and tipped out along with their kits and pots and pans. Even the chicken crates were dumped, the contents running eagerly away in an instant.

It took a full 15 minutes to get through the main instructions. Then questions. Where are the rations? How come no food? The food. You’ve got it. It’s the chickens. You want to eat them? Well, go catch them.

I love riding on the track, only there’s no gear to go up when you want to go up a gear. These numerous Welsh hobbits that turn up with little white beards they don’t half show me a clean pair of heels. I’m shamed. One said he was in his mid-70s.

The Japanese tourist board wants Julius on a calendar. Even in the cold, we still get helicopters outside the windows. We’re on fifth-floor now rather than on the tenth. But they’ve found us. Middle-aged Japanese women, all smiles and eagerness. I think the Japanese must get issued with a video camera at birth.

Every morning, our boy arrives and strips off to the waist as if they’re not out there in the morning air. What a clamour there is, it’s like in outer Croydon when Maria Sharapova she comes for tea with Edward Scissorhands. No, no…only joking there.

There’s a sponsor wanting his name on Julius’s torso. Immac. I have a confession - I don’t even know what that is. A deal is coming….only the hairy back must go. Julius will end up like these over-aged boxers you see on Eurosport, you know doing those cheap, low-grade bouts broadcast live from some French mining town close to the border with Belgium.

The Shining Light says that with Tintin now having four he should have the snip. Well that triggered quite a response. It dimmed the light, but only temporarily. So now she wants me to snuggle up to Ray O’Rourke. The mind boggles.

Mr Rotary-and-SAS-combination man threw me another wobbly, wonderfully unexpected. In fact two. He pays £80 a month for coaching…. and he’s training on a Powertap.

So we’re driving hard and talking Powertap, like him training to a plan and collecting data.

His follow-up surprise… he’s telling me about this Powertap girl who rides for Ireland and lives in Grenoble. Hey!! I know her, I stayed with her in the summer. He thinks I’m joking. Funny how some people don’t take me seriously.

Sure you remember the happenings at the polka-dot cult centre known as King of the Mountains, the specialist chalet for cyclists right across the valley from Alpe d’Huez.

It’s that time of year when the snows could be coming, so cut the logs and do the books. Time for a chat. We have this website vision, them and me, and the background is being painted in.

Well hello to news and it’s all change on the outdoor entertainment front. In the summertime, see, we’d file out clutching a coffee for a few minutes in the sun out on the balcony at the back of what was once the village school.

I had an excuse for loitering like this as I was aching from the day before, from riding Stage 16 of the Tour de Force….up to Toussuire.

But the rest – like Dave and Adam and the South Coast boys – were tapering for the Marmotte. To visualise it, think fat-boy-fest, think of the calorific combination of facing up to home-made cake while texting the wife/girl-friend/psychologist/whatever and reporting the ardours of the day.

The little stone shelf out the back was a fun place because you could gaze right down into someone else’s private life, into a neighbor’s back yard with its high wall and bare-earth, trodden half-shiny by two ever-circling dogs. Big ones. The sort you’d not want to go in with.

Day by day they each worked at their own tunnel, burrowed deeper and deeper under the one and only plant, the one protected from the ground up by a strong metal frame and a coating of plastic. This price and joy Christmas for its owner was in fact quite a splendid cannabis plant with lots of very healthy leaves.

Well moving on, one day in September is seems, Raphael the man dug the entire plant up and as the Irish would say…there it was…gone. What a lovely phrase that is.

Next news, the whole village went from high to higher. We’re talking of a mountain-top community here…. you know hardy survivor types in sturdy houses that are all squeezed together, braced against the elements. All narrow passages, fine for a horse, tight for a car, like with a decent stretch you can water the neighbour’s window box while still standing on your own threshold.

Madness rules. The dogs are out the gate and on the prowl, that’s not surprising with the gate flapping wide open. Our Helyn and a further posse round them up mid-morning. Turns out they’re surprisingly docile…. perhaps those roots they’d been sniffing.

When the posse usher the happy hounds back inside Raphael’s house, the place resembles a scene from a drugs-bust documentary with the main man totally zonked out on the sofa, rolled joints and joint rolling items strewn at random, tv babbling incessantly, trivia from the previous night and the whole place smelling to high heaven.

And a fast-forward to today? Well, the boy he done gone. Dogs an’ all.

Me….I’m on the move too, off out to meet the Multiplex man in Berkeley Square. Bring on the nightingales. Well, bring on the quaffing elbow and the red wine. We’re down to talking business, this is squashed into The Guinea, a fabulous little squeeze-in of a pub that is so totally out of fashion that I love it. Like the Tanners Arms was/is back in Alnwick. I’m pointed at a website…apparently it has a manager who is South African and is abysmally rude. Even better. He’s not out today. Must try again.

I could celebrate my 65th birthday here, book Planxty well ahead and sing my theme tune of the year….you know the one…….it’s so wonderfully anti-war and rebellious…

I had a first cousin called Arthur McBride
He and I took a stroll along the sea side….

I wonder if the guys in the SAS get to sing it, like while they’re out hunting chickens.

Just a thought.

Watts on for the winter... clothes off for the radio thief

2006-11-30T02:31:00.000-08:00

What a wonderful day. Or should I say what a wonderful night. I went out like a light thanks to a can of Guinness by way of celebration. Well, not quite…. I think I would have slept like a log anyway.

See, I’d been out in the shed mid-evening on the turbo. This was for my first serious session doing intervals. It’s the moment of truth. When I really knuckle down to the winter I start with period of three weeks where I do the longer kind…..60-seconds a time

The shorter ones come later….the “on” time halves to 30sec….and next to 20sec….then 15sec…so every three-week period is more and more explosive.

Last winter I could just, but only just, hold my power over 60sec at 250watts. So I knew that figure would be under threat. But you have to try. It’s called battling against age.

So far, power over 60secs has held firm, past year on past year.

Some nimbies waffle on about feeling their age whenever they hit a birthday. Some rabbit on about it whenever we go into a New Year. People with hair (lucky people) count up their grey strands.

I buy none of all that. For me, my judgment day is when I get down to it on the turbo.

The good news is that…..my one-minute power is intact. Yes. I must phone and tell Uncle Festa. He, he….my fee for giving him lead-outs has gone up. Forget the money, Jim lad, I want to come home and find Tina Turner under my bed.

Did you read that…the dodgy guy who was sleeping down in a hole he’d cut out under a little girl’s mattress. And it went un-noticed for three months. I’m still in disbelief. I mean…. did he come in and out the bedroom window by some invisible hydraulic platform? Does HSS hire out some silent stealth model these days? What about stealth socks and stealth tooth-brushing?

However…but don’t you let on….. I now look under my bed in hope, since it is proven possible, but all I’ve got so far is David Icke and some ten-foot lizards (one night only), a Muslim Bedouin’s saluki dog (well I put it there myself so no surprise) and Twinkle-eye’s mother-in-law (asleep but smiling sweetly). But hey, I did take her to the bus stop in the morning.

The office is in turmoil. There’s this monstrous alert, like we’re having a tidy. Oh come on, we’re journalists. If there’s one word in the entire world that defies definition it has to be the word tidy. I carry memories of my daughter’s bedroom and use them as my own marker for being tidy.

The phone rang and I was invited round to play with Beth. She’s crawling and dribbling. She’s over 10 months old.

So I’m thinking back to my own mum. She used that last phrase last when I was about four.

Beth is a treat. My little China-man’s tuft of white hair on the end of my chin fascinates her. She tugs it. I can see it’s going to hurt when she gets a grip.

They say she can’t walk yet….but I found that by sticking a slice malt loaf on her each hand, she can climb up French windows. See, I’m instilling her with lots of vitamin R. Don’t worry, I was there to catch her.... and I did.

I can see an email coming from an anxious reader. Tintin….he’ll want to know what brand of malt loaf it was.

As well as an office a tidy, but a move-around looms. A re-shuffle, a new office layout. So who gets me?

Cleopatra perhaps. She’s giving me the needle for never writing about her. Meanwhile Nick is getting nervous. He’s instructed me not to say anything about him so I won’t. Aren’t some people strange.

The Speckled Hen has been on form. What a cackle-blitz. She ought to write a show-biz column.

Well see, she lives well west of Sutton, I mean out in exclusivity, that patch north of Leatherhead where you get sneaky forests and away-residences with their big-arched opening gates and security lights with power, ones that glare in your face.

The Speckled Hen waves to Mr I-Have-No-Face when he’s out with his dog. And who is he? Think footballer. Famous. Chelsea. Come on guess. Which of their players is completely grey-mist in their hall of fame, like his feature are constantly pixcelled out even when they're not? Arnjo Robbin. Excuse my spelling. I don’t buy Chelsea.

Out clubbing with an 18-year-old niece (could be worse than doing intervals) who had a birthday. Next up she’s giving her mother away. Twinkle-eye wishes to add his mother-in-law to the package.

Still no sign of Tina Turner, by the way. I just looked.

The Speckled Hen ran her grolly-trolly over the foot of some dolly in Marks & Spencer and I’m only vaguely on mind alert, but like when Edward Scissorhands hears that the dolly in question was Louise Redknapp he went into total slaver mode. She’s got ranking. She’s one of the 3000 pin-ups on his list.

Laura passed through the other day. She once worked here, next to Split-Pea. She was totally awesome at sneezing. She blew the end windows right out one morning. This is when we were still on the tenth floor. The publisher twice found himself suddenly sitting back-to-front….and that in his own little office. Split-pea wore a helmet.

Officially she bunked off with a golf professional to Ireland….but what I can tell you, though, is that she got hired by Ellen MacArthur on that round-the-world yacht trip she did, for back-up. Good job too. The boat was a full week down on schedule at one time. This is mid-ocean.

Then Laura got summoned to the scene and positioned on a well chunky trawler at a short distance to the rear. Then they put Laura into sneeze mode and the rest is history. I wish she’d come and watch me race. Strategically placed, I’d blow the hills away, interval training or not.

It’s wonderful how a third glass of red wine, imbibed in a warm room with lots of glowing people can induce the stories, the merriment. I wish I was a bon-viveur.

Well, my little story came from Polyblox Construction where I have this cycle-related link. And yes, she does intervals in case you are wondering.

Anyway the boyfriend in question moved jobs, from selling fire doors to this new post in Swindon. Being great at the marketing schpeeeel, he’s on a ladder marked “up” and is now selling fork-lift trucks.

He’s got these army mates, see, and they do drinking sessions. So they’re coming out and they get to catch this radio thief. Red-handed. In the car. Well, the police are going to be a total waste of time, so they all pile in with the guy and off they go.

After 150 miles, in a wet field, they get all his clothes off and let him out. I hope you’re not chuckling. It’s not PC.

Byeeeee.

Swarms of police for the horse-box parade

2006-11-15T01:51:00.000-08:00

Here I am out on the bike, coaching with a group of riders and you wouldn’t believe the swarming that’s going on. This time it’s not us in that handlebar-to-handlebar training routine, but the police.

Yes we have the police swarming round us, all piled like sardines in inconspicuous-grade people-carrier vans….looking matt-coated and dull. No gloss.

But they’re no use to us. It’s like they want a riot to get stuck into….but there isn’t one and so they’re sitting round brewing cups of tea and clocking up overtime. I mean if they want to be useful why don’t they help us?

When it’s a cyclist or a cycling event that could do with some help, the police don’t want to know. Bizarre.

We are having a coaching session, numerous riders out on the public highway, split into several small groups. Totally ignored.

We’re in green countryside, going round little circuits close to our base which is the splendidly adequate village hall at Newchapel.

But these vans keep roaming past in an aimless fashion and then they stop. Bordering on being a nuisance to us really. How about seeing us safely round corners, guys?

What’s it all about? Has one of us stolen the world’s last packet of Spangles? Has one of us been identified as some secret myrtle jam importer?

No, and again no. They’re gobbling up tax payers' money because there is a hunt in progress. Well there might be as wherever there’s a roadside patch of grass there’s a parked horse box on it. Empty. Back-ramps all down.

Have you ever cycled behind a horse box? It’s like being in a gas chamber. Who exactly fakes these people’s MOTs? Someone somewhere is sure making a fortune out of dodgy paperwork.

How come the hunt/hunt saboteur stand-off can waste so many police man-hours when it’s only a sport, given that cycling gets told to scram when it wants similar help?

But enough of the through-and-off training on the flat-land. We regroup and hive off to a new circuit, to a lovely chunk of uphill. Not a mountain….but by racing standards it’s quite a testing bite-size little number.

Today’s Surrey League-related session (this one is all women) has some quite strong riders. “Get out the saddle and give it everything”, is the instruction from me.

Not exactly that it’s followed…a third of the riders do just that but too many stay sitting in the saddle.

They won’t come January – I’ll have a new weapon. I’m getting that saluki dog soon from the Muslim Bedouin who stopped hunting gazelle in the desert. No quarantine thanks to an illicit small-boat exchange out in the Channel, on the Godwin Sands in fact. Then in through a little cove near Littlehampton.

The dog is trained to snap heels, says the seller. I’m paying him in euros acquired from Uncle Festa. For today’s session, though, I need instant back-up so I ask a police marksman to help….there’s a restless one in a field over a gate taking pot-shots at squirrels and he’s doing quite well.

Couldn’t he splatter the tarmac behind the last rider’s back wheel, you know like you see in terrorist training camps. It looks like quite a gee-up on those clips on tv.

Tinitis is a constant noise splatter in my head. Always on the go. Wednesday in the office was much worse. I’d been hacking the keyboard for half the next story, splattering words onto print (metaphorically) when a movement caught my eye. It was Buttons outside the door with no security pass. She was stood hammering away with her fists and mouthing air.

So I let here in and ask a question. Hey, do you have this vision, like before the words have even left your mouth you already know the answer before it's come?

“ How did you get past the barriers down in the entrance then?” I asked? But I already knew.

“I hurdled them,” she says. Well, almost. One arm’s snapped right off, the other metal barrier iss bend double. Two security guys are still out there on the loose. I’m wondering …. can we expect to see Lady Penelope doing the same thing?. More pink scarf and limping?

Do they charge for these repairs out of our magazine’s budget? Another silly question.

Halfway through that coaching session I had shuddering realisation….like one of my 16 riders in the group is sister-in-law to the Welsh Woman. I visualised her with the red kites and chopped people-meat and the disappearing dice-up friends from Sutton. So I rode alongside her and was nice. Well by my standards.

The office rumour is that Split-Pea is to become a dad. The birth should trigger quite a punch-up. The last time the famous four, that's the parents and the in-laws, met up they had a right old set-too. It was in Las Vegas in the middle of Split-Pea's wedding. The vicar was laid out cold. I don't think they're actually even married.

So place your bets. The re-match live from Maternity Ward Six. Coming to you on YouTube. I’ve taken advertising rights.

Perhaps they should get the police in for that.

The office meercat is up again. Neck and eyes. Should I smile?

Red kites overhead and Spangles in Queslett

2006-10-31T03:50:00.000-08:00

I’m looking at red kites. Not just one red kite but eight and I’ve been looking at them, like on and off, all day. And yesterday as well. Me, I’m stumbling into my 60s as you know, and I’ve never seen a red kite in my entire life before now….but here they are everywhere.

And for the first time I’ve remembered to set off with my boots and socks and rucksack….and the binoculars. So the kites look huge. Absolutely huge. All silent glide on an up-current, just the furthest feathers flickering slightly and turning up like fine fingers.

Before, I once watched this programme on the tv and there were 40 red kites on show. This was mid-Wales. But the whole thing was spoilt when it showed a woman walking into the middle of a field, tumbling squares of red meat into the grass and letting them all come piling in. To me that was a fraud, like factory farming meets wildlife.

What is less well known, and wasn’t said at the time, is that the squares of red meat were once people, like those who commented (unfavourably) on the Welsh Woman’s awful singing. So we’re talking Sutton residents and former colleagues.

I was only told that recently, but it explains a lot. Like people I know who are gone missing. You cut her up with your criticism and she dices you up with a cleaver. Perhaps as well she’s no longer filing my pink FT clippings.

These proper red kites are north of London, in the Chilterns. Daughter is on a mission to walk every long-distance trail before her teeth fall out/boots rot/joints seize. We chip in from time to time. Like when rain is forecast. I always take an umbrella. Some ramblers won’t walk with me.

Three Christmas’s ago I was a guest with Huddersfield Rucksack Club. “We’ve never had anyone with an umbrella,” said Duncan, he a stalward bootman for 50 years. I offered him the chance to disown me by walking 100m behind everyone. That calmed him down. He spoke to me at lunch.

Daughter is close to the end of The Ridgeway challenge. It’s a trail with lovely views and a fake history.

She had me stop to look at something not worth looking at…. King Alfred’s Cakes.

Black and round they were….and so well named. I instantly thought of my grade of toast. You know, similar colour. There they were, about three dozen of them all along a huge ash tree-slump that had broken off, so laid flat on the ground and starting to rot.

I had to sit down. Well, daughter explaining to dad what this fantastic black fungus can do. You don’t eat it, silly, you store it and dry it and light fires with it, rubbing two sticks together. Hey, I’m not Ray Mears. I get cold fingers and cold toes. But, but…..how does she know these things??

Boyfriend and she are suddenly experts, well near-experts, on fungi and things, edible and otherwise. They’ve asked me round for a treat only they want to see my will before we sit down. I’m suspicious.

Cycling is here, don’t worry, but it’s not up-front this week. Jane was on the phone, this is for a coaching session I’m doing on Sunday. I thought all this religious extremist stuff was another world from mine. Well, I live in Surrey.

But so does she. There’s these four kids at private school (not that I approve of private schools). So, the husband has moved more and more nutty. He once had a decent job. Not now. He’s gone so far beyond extreme he’s in a cult.

So he’s giving away big slices of cash, from time to time, to his leader. This is out of the joint account. She threatened a divorce. He said he’d want five of her wine stores. Bloody hell. She’s got 10, some in Wolverhampton, some in Bognor Regis. That’s her income, her ticket for life.

She’s somewhere I’d not want to be. I can see a solution which involves him being fed to red kites before too long. Hopefully not those lovely ones in the Chilterns.

Listen, in the whole of two days walking, we didn’t see a single rabbit. And I was a benefactor (not often you’ll hear that). Listen, this other rambler guy comes running up to us saying his wife can hardly walk because of blisters and new boots and can he have a plaster. Well no…but there’s some SecondSkin in my baggage. Somewhere. Ahhh, found them. He takes one.

Up the hill and I’m looking back through the binoculars and she’s giving us a thumbs up. We walk on. I slap the daughter for picking sloes and getting under the feet. I see a wild damson tree and stop to pick and eat. I get a slap, then another. Life is so unfair.

Polyblox Construction in Queslett, that’s in the sunny Birmingham conurbation if you didn’t know, have now done a survey of their existing workforce.

And?? 50% have grandchildren and 20% receive the government’s £200 winter heating allowance. More interestingly, five still drive Hillman Imps. The two who had Coronation Day mugs sold them on eBay during the past year (how sad)…..and one (wait for the big build-up) has a square metal box containing 320 flattened Spangles wrappers and two untouched packets. Can you believe that!!

The rumour-mill has it that Wates Construction is thinking of making a take-over bid, well that’s the word, so I need to act, to do a deal with Jonny swashbuckler with teeth Wates….like no nice write-up unless I get to meet with Spangles man and negotiate one-to-one.

Six King Alfred’s Cakes for one wrapper. Deal or no deal?

Ageing with Spangles, swarming with one-handed cyclists

2006-10-17T04:36:00.000-07:00

What a week. Suddenly we have a banned list of words that can’t appear in job adverts any more. State-your-age is no more, it’s right out of the window, followed by descriptions…….

Youthful and recent graduate can’t feature. Experienced has gone, then a wadge of more words including energetic, vibrant, quick-learner and self-starter. Mmm…is that because we the old do have the above, or rather that we don’t.

I thought myself immune to this swell of total nonsense as more important issues swirl round, battling for my immediate time. Three Ghanaian cyclists want Dougie’s address for some visa scam involving a letter-of-permission and their High Commission. He’s organising a cycling event and this is what he gets. I need to keep him sweet as his love-lady Lorraine’s husband has a tip-off from a PFI conference in Poland. His phone is down.

And a Muslim Bedouin guy wants to sell me his dog, a saluki, as he’s stopped hunting gazelle in the desert. Plus a tent. Just the thing for marketing man, Johnny on-safari Wates. I might manage a decent mark-up when I see him next week.

And here’s this construction firm in Birmingham offered me a few bottles of red wine….Barolo so all the more tempting….to tidy up a form of questions that would help them circumvent, oops I mean conform, the give-us-your-age problem on future job application forms.

So if you apply for a job with Polyblox Construction in Queslett in the next few months and you recognise some of these, just stay calm. At least you know where they came from. Here we go……..

Q1 do you have children?
Q2 are they……pre-school…at school…at university…working
Q3 do you have grand-children?
Q4 how many years ago did you start losing your hair?
Q5 do you receive the government’ £200 winter heating allowance?
Q6 are you eligible for free prescriptions?
Q7 did you or your father fight in the Boer War
Q8 tick if you have owned any of the following…..Model-T Ford…Austin A40…Hillman Imp
Q9 were you given a free mug on Coronation Day in 1952?
Q10 do you remember Spangles.

And while we’re thinking about the latter - what the fxxx ever happened to them?? Did they get sucked into some black hole? Will they suddenly emerge from a time warp and make us happy?

The only good thing about getting old, when you’re among veterans doing races, is that every five years you go up into a new age-band. Notice that it’s up. Positive. So you do better against the older guys. It doesn’t last though…as the next year another fresh round of guys get promoted and you’re back to square one.

Do I show ageist attitudes? Well, you decide. Thanks to our recent move of office, we dropped five floors to a new set of windows, I’ve lost my trusty ruler….but acquired someone’s flash-drive. Overall….I think it’s a backward step, a poor deal, but I don’t know why. Probably because a ruler does useful things. Like underlining words. And it’s mighty good for slapping passing twits.

Rob Roy’s treading of carrot fields goes on. This weekend he was in the Beccles Marshes before sleeping under the stars overnight and then heading northwards for Lower Thurlton. He’s in line for a top place at the Carrot Awards Night, or so he says.

The Frinton town council put Twinkle-eye’s mother on a train for home, asleep but fully labelled. What curious concept that is. My mind starts to imagine her as a jar of chutney.

Nick is getting nervous. He’s instructed me not to say anything about him, so I won’t.

I did a whole day coaching on Sunday with a whole army of riders who want to take up racing. All women. Set up by Bex at SheCycles.com. We must have given them a hard time because during the lunch break they seemed to scoff everything in sight, like at least 80 brown parcel packs on a tray and stacked halfway to the roof marked alternately, meat or veg, plus whole cakes sliced in multitude, plus heaps of fruit.

Also in a naughty corner there was a dish with nothing but Kit Kats, the two-bar variety…one rider took three and looked sheepish.

She’d given her age as 55 on the forms so I thought she deserved a big smile and a break. If it hadn’t been an ageist thing to say, I’d have said she was remarkable taking up racing at that time of….

Lunch over and then another two sessions right through to close on 4pm. No wonder I slept like a log. I dreamt I was under a hedge somewhere in Norfolk with my faithful saluki laid at my side.

Annett came as helper. It was a good job as it was all hands on deck. All in all, we were two coaches and three helpers out there on the track. This was Hillingdon where you can get on tarmac on a private race circuit. Built for cyclists. Wonderful.

Riding in lines six-abreast at one time, we were, right arm out and hand on the next person’s shoulder on your right. Stay calm. Stay in line. Repeat only now to the left. Much harder. This is swarming, to give it its technical name. It was Mac’s idea.

At lunch a small girl spotted my scoffing chocolate biscuits. I was sitting in the sunshine at the end with a coffee and she reappeared with more, a virtual trayful. The day’s remnants. It was impolite to refuse so I scoffed a whole handful and she giggled and hived off, probably to tell her mum. So if you read this Helen, I only took four. Honestly.

The boys in the lift and the leg of salted ham

2006-10-09T04:31:00.000-07:00

The Canadian geese are back, circling overhead. Masses of them come to earth and the grassland along the River Mile disappears fast…..so do the Canadian geese thanks to Hana the Serbian sniper.

I’ve had to deliver a trolley-load to three guys I hammered at football, just to placate them. They still have bruises and keep kicking me at work in the lift. Split Pea took another four for his regular customers. He’s pretty well upgraded from pigeons now, the ones he caught under the railway bridge back at Three Arches. He’s moved to a new house just next from Gatwick airport. I’m thinking of selling space in his drive for parking, he doesn’t yet know.

Edward Scissorhands, who became one of them, unashamedly crossing the great divide from editorial to advertising two months ago, is still visible in the far distance. His head is there over the great divide. Julius says it’s a big improvement.

Edward’s new seating is next to mystery-man Frieze-dried Banesto. We sort of inherited the guy when we moved….one day we were all boxed up and bundled out of our happy home up on the tenth floor, like one Friday afternoon, and unpacked our familiar sprawl into a mirror of space on the fifth floor, on the Monday morning after….and Freize-dried B was sort of already here, manacled top the wall.

Who left him? Who knows. We throw him food. He likes it.

Julius has spend three days hiding in Mr Sorehead’s secret cupboard. Only towards the end did he realise the leg he kept touching wasn’t that of his one remaining Russian bride at all, but a salted ham. The Shining Light is due amongst us again next week, so we can anticipate Julius repeating the same avoidance routine. He’s such a coward.

New-world-man Scissorhands has taken up mountain-biking. Well sort of. He’s been letting Erroll get him sorted, so they’ve variously been in four leaky sheds for six various weekends and now have 15 non-compatible nearly-ready bikes-to-go. Most have a front wheel. One has three wheels. That was a mistake. He might be out on the muddy stuff by Easter.

Father-of-SnipSnip’s road bike has been pressed into service. We might see new-world-man Edward in lycra soon. We could send Claire Moody the photos.

No further sightings of David Icke but the twelve-foot lizards are still on the prowl. They’ve been off and eaten Button’s goats, well four of them. Split-pea is fearing for his in-laws.

Since moving, we’re share the entire fifth floor, half and half, with another magazine, so another load of journos. These ones cover catering and they do trials in the fridge….with strawberries and raspberries. They turn grey after a time…. I could have told them right off that soft fruits won’t fossilise even if you leave them for three months. Funny how things eventually drip.

I’m still a new boy at yoga. We do it here on a Thursday. It’s magic. I have pains all through Friday in places I’ve never had before. Dave, my IT insider here, can stand on his head. The yoga lady rings a bell at the end now because I relax and go off to sleep on my mat.
Buttons and Tex both won prizes to come but they never show up. When it’s time to go, they both hide in the Sorehead cupboard. Julius prefers them to the salt

Smoked eels in Holland....but a kicking in Cheam

2006-09-28T08:45:00.000-07:00

It’s sunny and it’s Friday afternoon and I’m at work….sitting outside at a bar in the middle of Holland. It’s tough being a business editor.

All around there’s dykes and water, fields and grassy flatness and being outside at a table under a tree there’s the view of what passes. I kid you not, there’s been more cyclists steadily a-rolling by than cars during the past 20 minutes or so. Not fancy racing cyclists but everyday humans bodging about, no big hurry, carrying stuff in baskets, riding two-abreast and talking.

But what’s this? Two tables from us, a guy starts to spread his ware. First there’s his cloth and then a large aluminium foil wrapping and then a mountain of sticks of something or other. No, I can’t see so I walk over. Well blow me, they’re all fish. Hold on, they’re not fish at all….they’re eels. Smoked eels.

I'm with Pieter Koenders and we both have one apiece. They’re lovely. I’ve never had eel in my life. It’s marvellous. I’d imagined something rubber and tasteless but it’s not all. I’m all for wrapping a dozen up and bringing them home. I’m booked Club Class in British Airways where they all try to read the FT and there’s no room. I’m travelling light. No bag. My publisher might not be impressed if I’m hauled up for smuggling in eels. Is it illegal? I’m not sure.

As it is, I’m in the good books as I put my hand up for five-a-side football. Contract Killers we were, playing for charity against riff-raff from about 300 other magazines in the same office. Where all these nubile young males appeared from I just don’t know. Usually it’s lift-squeeze and fatness all round.

At a guess, I’d say I was the only one over 60. In fact I’d say I was the only one over 50….even 40. Not that the refs gave me much sympathy. Listen, we were on the Goals set up, it’s at nearby North Cheam, so 12 mini pitches, all squashed up back-to-back. I’ve not played for 40 years so it was asking a lot of the pins. The refs (and we had four) were a bit mutinous. What they considered to be an illegitimate sliding tackle (and punishable) was what I called a good piece of work.

We went down gloriously. Twenty six goals against - one goal for.

That one was Tim in Advertising. It was a cracker, right from a kick-off. It terms of quality it was worth 27 of any of theirs. We had a captain, also from advertising. He was wearing a Rod Stewart wig but I still recognised him. He had a polite word with me about my tackles. We’re all good friends though. I have to say, it achieved more bonding than anything else we’ve ever done.

So….I’m a member of our quiz team tomorrow night. It might result in more un-bonding than anything I’ve ever done. I hope publishers are banned.

I came in one morning and there was a bag on my desk and inside the wrapping was a pot of jam. Not just any old brand. This was myrtle jam.

Have you ever arrived at work to find a pot of myrtle jam waiting for you? I thought not.

As the story unravelled it turns out that it had been brought all the way from Toulouse especially for me. And all because of the blog….you remember the book Riding High, the write-up of the three-week cycling epic by Paul Howard who did the Tour de France with the Tour de France by setting off each day (as an ordinary guy) five hours ahead of them (the professionals).

Paul, otherwise known as Tintin, is back working here. Well some days.

Every 61-year-old worth his salt should know what myrtle jam is. It was one of Paul’s sources of power during his ride. He spread it on everything. I blush at the admission, but I didn’t know what myrtle jam was, exactly. Sort-of yes I did, but only within a good guessing zone. I hope you’ve the answer by now, dear reader… especially Mr Johnny harpoon interloper Wates.

It’s bilberry jam. Perhaps we’ll get asked that in the quiz.

I was a train spotter once. I know, some people think that’s nearly as bad as being a child molester, so you should hush it up. Well tough. So I’m offering you this about the French TGV….the paper published in pink tells me that the per-seat operating costs are seven times less than those of an Airbus A320.

And the TGV uses 25-times less energy to get around. So why can you fly Ryanair from Stansted to Grenoble for 1p…I hear you ask. In fact, I ask myself? There’s something that’s not right with the sums. Perhaps someone wants an ozone hole over the Alps.

I’ve got three cycle coaching sessions fixed for the autumn.

One in November is for riders planning to the Etape next summer…or a big humongous cyclosportif like Les Trois Ballons or le Vuajany. Tintin the myrtle jam provider, alias Paul Howard, is one of the speakers.

Another is Lee Oliver who knows me from races and regularly appears on websites as MrAngry of AngryTowers. He blew up on the final climb up to Alpe d’Huez on last Etape which started in Gap. He has his measurements, his watts output. The Etape was a mock-up of Stage 15 of the Tour.

I did a mock-up of Stage 16 on a different day. But I know the feeling. Rubber legs. Eat more eels.

More soon. John

Street badminton and wagtails

2006-09-06T05:58:00.000-07:00

Hey picture this…..I’m walking the pavement and I’m just coming round this blind corner, having been a bit lost I must confess, and yes it’s good….the sign up on the wall says Carter Lane. I’m in EC4, so the middle of London, just a few minutes walk away from Blackfriars. This is mid-afternoon….and what do I find in the road, like right in the middle of the road….two guys playing badminton.

So what about traffic? We’re only one street off St Paul’s Cathedral. It’s seems all wrong. How come? The first guy skims my ear, well his raquet does and the shuttlecock zapps away-bound…then comes back.

“It’s our stress therapy,” he says grinning. Talking to who? To me?

I feel an attraction towards nutters so I put my briefcase down, it seems only natural, and I join in…I see that they need a net and so it’s like I’m some Worzel Gummidge, stood in the street all arms outstretched. I’d like to hand them some myrtle jam but I’m not carrying any.

I was doing a cycle race on Sunday, well preparing for it. This is at Horsemonden in Kent in the cricket pavilion. Outside is a covered area. It’s dry here, ideal for lying down and pressing up. You know me, need to get rid of backache. Ideal also for watching birds. Pied wagtails to be precise. There are 15 of them out there on the short-trimmed turf. What a sight. It’s very satisfying.

HSS are considering adding a wheelbarrow for duck punts to their next catalogue. Wow. Fame for our two boys. They’ll be adding a range of adze next.

I’ve been videoed…while in with the doctor. I had to sign a form twice, before and again after. I’d have had a head polish if I’d known. Anyway she’s a purveyor of bad news. Like it’s degeneration. No, I did not want to hear that. I wanted it to be an ailment, something with a cure, or a cream, or anything amounting to an exit.

Degeneration is not my direction of choice. Methinks I’m in urgent need of some stem cells, like a back-up pot or two in the fridge, behind the yoghourt. I can see that a new index finger would be good.

Perhaps I also some leg muscles as mine seem to be disappearing fast….I need more power.

Did you read that thanks to global warming a monstrous flesh-eating bacterium is spreading northwards in the ocean. It’s already got to salty European waters…like the Baltic. Previously it was mostly in the Gulf of Mexico. It’s fancy name is Vibrio vulnificus.

Perhaps it’s sneaked into my watering can and the wet slops have run down my leg. Damn the hot weather.

I spotted a new Kit Kat wrapper this week. Excellent news. Added that to the collection.

Smoked out and flashed at..so time to join i-Skive?

2006-08-30T05:56:00.000-07:00

I’ve just finished a race and I’m wobbly. It was so hard. We did 25 laps and every time up the hill I struggled big-time. I was gasping no end.

Here’s the car…..I’ve parked up at exactly in the same place as the other week when that ironmonger was alongside me. No, he’s not here again, instead it’s somebody I know. Mick.

We’ve both just been in the same race and (to my shame) he was pounding up the hill like some spring chicken even thought he’s in a different/older age band to me…so a different coloured number on his back. So he’s at least 65 years and wearing well.

I sort of want to talk him into joining the same club as me. See, he lives in Sutton and I work in the self-same sunny spot. And we do the same races. He’s already on-board so he winds down the window. And what’s he up to, this hero of the hill? He’s having a smoke. Well, I sure didn’t expect that.

I just can’t get my heart-rate up the same as I once could so I’m seriously thinking I should become a bat.

Listen….we went for a walk with the Surrey Bat Group the other night. We met at Gatton Park and walked to a big lake armed with bat detectors that twitched when you got a pipistrelle in your sights (whatever sights is when it’s dark).

The bats were hiding somewhat… though I did get the sound of continuous tinnitus. It’s mine and it's endless. It’s a pain.

The man said that a bat’s heart-rate, when it's hunting, is 1000 beats a minute. Wow. I could do with some of that. I could smoke cigars two at a time and still get up hills.

I’m worrying about my driving. I’ve had two speeding tickets, so six points, since I got this Berlingo from Citroen. That’s in less than a year. I should change my boots.

Coming to this bike race I’d just got through the first lights after the Blackwell Tunnel and this speed camera went flash. Not again. But I was being over-taken at the time and the guy overtaking me was also being overtaken at the same time, so grounds for hope. Nine points and I would die.

But now for the fruitcakes, the team I work with. Little news in recent weeks, so here we go….

The shock is that Twinkle-eye has quit and is to become the helmsman on new lifestyle web-site entitled i-Skive, producing it from a banana warehouse on Canvey Island.

Tex, his mission scout, gets the heavy end of the load here. But she’s strong enough for two.

In a move designed to stem the flow of tears (is that of grief, you ask, or out of gratefulness….ahhh… the uncertainty) Rob Roy has organised the bus-load of us to the next Opportunity Knocks contest in Frinton, Essex, to see our former hero’s rousing repertoire of Alvin Stardust numbers. I can’t wait.

“I love Frinton,” Twinkle-eye said, glassy-eyed at his leaving-do. “It has this ambiance….and the mother-in-law can’t get there…there’s only one road in and I pay the guy who opens the gates at the railway crossing £400,000 a year to keep her out.”

I think this was only half-true. I’m a sort of gullible soul really.

Rob Roy has been treading the carrot fields of East Anglia. Not so much a Munro-bagger but a carrot bagger. He has a collection of photos of every field he has trod this side of Norwich and he has a plan to lead a carrot invasion of Poland next summer. I don’t know why. It seems there’s a website and 150 have expressed interest. Three from Sutton.

In four days' time, Julius and Apollo Screed will be heading up to Budle Bay, next to Holy Island in Northumberland, lured to the remote spot by a vision of flocks of wild duck, there for the taking at dawn from desperados tucked away in the hidden inside section of a duck punt. They read too many blogs.

The home-made craft has now been adzed to perfection by the hairy chested Julius but it floats with a wobble. The gun mounting is suspect. The two Russian brides have been sent out picking mushrooms around Mardon. I’m doing a bike race there on Sunday.

The punt is taking some moving. There’s nothing in the HSS catalogue under ‘large wheelbarrow will fit punt’ so it will go northwards as hand-luggage on a stopping bus… or three. I think Julius is being ambitious in this….or he must know more conductresses than he’s owned up to.

Buttons has good reason to skip and dance….her Weight Watcher’s certificate confirms the loss of 50lbs. Wow. Congratulations, I say. She confiscates office chocolates.

Her barrier-leaping reputation went all round the entire office. Lady Penelope thought she should lead from the front so she spun in through the front door and she tried the high-leap routine as well. So the guys have been fixing broken barriers again. That’s twice now. We now have to leave in groups….under escort.

Byeeeel......best get a'gait John

iClimb...the website for the seriously inclined

2006-08-22T09:49:00.000-07:00

I’m on the phone to France. It’s not a hurried call and I’m not counting my pennies which is strange for me. See, I’ve switched from BT and am now pouring my funds into the hands of Charles Dunstone, or is it Charles Blogstone, he at TalkTalk.

He says it’s all free….well it’s £21 a month the way I see it. His blurb said broadband is all free and continental calls are all free, so I switched. The first bills contained start-up hiccups, so we’ll see.

But I’m a’chatting away about the Alpe d’Huez venture, the plans for 2007…there’s a bit more shape now. I’m wagging on with Guy over at his King of the Mountains chalet in the thin air and we did some blue sky thinking.

Hey, it was good. OK, blue sky is over the top so let’s call it light-blue sky thinking. Anyway, here’s an outline shape.

We have to tackle the big question –where’s the finish exactly? How do you find it? Alpe d’Huez is a big, sprawling ski resort after all with a labyrinth of streets.

But my answer is simple…just think what they do in any big hospital…. they lead you to where you want to be by threading/painting a coloured line on the floor for you. Away it goes, twisting and turning down the various corridors.

So do the same at Alpe d’Huez. What colour then? Orange. That’s my vote….and for not other reason than because I think orange is good. It’s distinctive, it’s a fun colour.

The orange line could start somewhere near the top on a clear bit of road, perhaps as you ride towards the final turn, Virage 1, and it might kick off with a sign/emblem to the side pronouncing “1km to finish line”.

I like that idea….a marker post, tickled up with the King of the Mountains own logo. It’s a pretty nifty little set of green polka-spots. Have you seen it?

Then a straight line of vivid paint all along the tarmac with some sort of blip/reminder device to count you down. Push, pedal, push. The little circle says 900m…then 800m…then 700m…and so on. That way you’d finish on your knees but in the right place, like where the Tour de France finishes.

If not orange, perhaps a blue paint. Depends what the tourist board thinks.

Guy thinks to create an add-on extra zone on the King of the Mountains website. But it would still need its own title.

Like what? The home page for the seriously inclined…corny, yes, but I like it

iClimb….well it’s a cool thought and we are in the iPod era….or so I’m told.

Then a tad of blurb like….Call yourself a mountain goat?

Something that’s challenging and interesting, a little magnet. Or else…

Why not put your name on the cycling world’s most famous ladder to the sky? Here’s how.

But I’m a journalist not a marketing person so I need to “run it by” someone. Colette perhaps or Surrey League Cycling’s hoary old chestnut Roger Morgan.

Page 1 for individuals. Page 2 for teams of three…same club and no cheating.

We need some sort of feature article to gee up interest for next year. Come in VC Etoile….you might be the guinea pigs. Has no-one told you yet?

So….to move on.

I’m planning to put my own body at risk with some testing.

It’s all the result of reading this book The Adventures of Tintin and then us having Tintin no less here at work, an author here in the office. We sit back-to-back and he talks and types….and sometimes sings early Beetles numbers and brews up Earl Grey.

Tintin is how I see him but in a parallel - and perhaps real - world that you people are in, Tintin appears as Paul Howard. He’s got thin legs and they both have hair. You could clean the inside of ketchup bottles with them. Despite the edging frills, he rode the Tour de France and wrote a book called Riding High.

Buy it. Or read it. Good for Etape aspirants and other unsaintly people.

Paul rode the Tour largely on myrtle jam. He smeared the stuff on everything, thought he doesn’t mention if this included his legs. I will ask.

He’s also a world expert on malt loaf. I’m not. It seems that not all malt loaves are the same.

The ones I buy are cracking. You get a mouthful on board and then it’s like living with a golf ball inside you for ten minutes as your teeth can’t penetrate the elasticated stuff and your jaw muscles slowly and inexorably move towards exhaustion.

Paul says come to Burgess Hill and we’ll ride up and down Ditchling Beacon to destruction, me on Brand A malt loaf and him on Brand B and the first one who is helpless in the ditch knows they got the short straw. Paul sniggers as he’s already got inside knowledge. This is going to be like me starring in Belleville Rendezvous, I can see it coming.

But I’m going to get my own back….with my own second consumer test. He he he.

Mythology has it that once upon a time, professionals with saddle sores rode by sitting on a steak, but is it true? Do you know anyone who does that?

Well I’m going to turn up at Paul’s with a couple of steaks. You pick, Paul, rump or braising steak. We’ll see who sits the longest, up and down and up and down Ditchling Beacon.

Then what? Ahh….well into the pan for a fry-up. Waste not want not as they say.

I guess the danger is that you suddenly find that you’re eating what was the other person’s former cushion…you know one pan with two steaks and someone spins it round by the handle.

No, I can’t do this to Paul. He’s a friend. He’s from Doncaster. So probably best to sucker some neutral soul down for the day with a promise of a barbecue…..someone famous…..

…..Charles Dunstone comes to mind. He could blog us, make us famous. Paul and I could chew on a sausage while the innocent soul chews on a verdict. Would I do that?

The christening went well, by the way, thanks in large to the non-appearance of the horde of gravy mongers from the north.

A non-cycling day so we had a walk through Reigate down a lovely pedestrianised narrow street and there was this pub, The Nutley Arms, with a strange sign, like guys hewing away in a salt mine, well near but not quite….

….see, the pub sits on the finest-grained sand in the whole country and if you’ve got an egg-timer then there’ll be some of these grains in it. In old times when it was quiet, see, the guys in the pub used to dive off underground and get on with some digging, tunnelling, whatever.

So if you meander into the Nutley Arms on a sunny day, with the doors wide open but no-one in sight to do any serving, then look for the open trap-door, lean over and holler.

There, you learn such a lot by reading this stuff.

Byeeeeee.

The key to coaching.....and the northern gravy tribe

2006-08-18T02:59:00.000-07:00

The Tour de Force has been an era for me, a self-consuming time zone, what with chasing after sponsors, then months of putting in longest-ever training rides every Tuesday, and then the event for real.

No surprise then that I’d put the rest of the year, well rest of my life, into a pot marked “Forget It”.

Jonny Wates has just fired over a neat summary which says that the money raised has inched even further ahead and now stands at £350,000. Wow.

A total of 98 riders all did their bit. There were some nasty tumbles (I avoided them) and some sore backsides (but I didn’t escape that).

At the end of the day, the charity’s “bold” target of raising £100,000 has been more than trebled. Mr Wates-with-Broad-Smile is happy. He says: “We can do great things to help disadvantaged young people with that amount of money”. I’m just pleased that you people out there all helped me to do my bit

But then, but now, but suddenly..….the lid’s been forced off and the non-future is here. Time to step out.

The going-forward mode was triggered by a phone call last night. “Will you come and do a coaching day for us in October,” asked Janet from Twickenham. “You remember, we met at Newport velodrome.” When is it? It’s the weekend after my last race of the year…so yes. In fact I felt a bit honoured.

It will be at Hillingdon on a fully-enclosed, car-free circuit. I staged an event there myself once but I fell foul of the anti-brigand devices and snapped the key in the lock. I felt a right burk. It was so difficult to fit your hand through all the struts and bars. I vowed never to get caught again. The deal is that Janet opens the gates.

“And will you do a follow-up a month later, so we can advertise it in advance?” That sounds like a good idea, so I’m “yes” to that also.

So we’re now talking November. Way ahead but I’m on the phone to Mrs Kench. Yes - the hall is booked….all we need now is good weather.

I’ve got the slot right next to a booking made 18 months ago, no less, and it’s for a guy who wants to celebrate his 80th birthday with his mates. Well he’s survived, he’s still alive and kicking. I sort of feel I might offer to pay his fee as well, in a sort of “well done” gesture. Or give him some pots of myrtle jam.

No race for me this coming weekend. Well there is a race, but I’ve been pulled out as it’s the christening.

Little grand-daughter Beth is a few months old by now and I’ve made her smile some bits, and I’ve fed her a few spoons-full of pear, sweet and much-mangled, that was donated by a friendly neighbourly soul, and she’s getting handy at tugging on my nice little Chinese beard, or tuft, or whatever else it get called. So I’m mighty chuffed with all that.

I’ve been asked to be the photographer. That’s quite an honour.

I thought giving a tiny tot like Beth some pear puree was natural progress from a from-birth, all-milk diet. But…..our lot up north don’t think that way and every time the Huddersfield brigade come on the phone it’s always the same question….

“’Ows Beth? As ta got ’er on t’ gravy yet?”

Gravy! Can you believe….gravy. So I picture/dread them all rolling up on Sunday in a sweat, wheels all steaming hot from a car scrimmage all down the M1, all armed to the teeth with…… bowls of gravy.

Thick gravy. Thin gravy. Mutton gravy. Poor child.

I picture/dread them crowding round, all leaning over and starting up a chant:

“Cum on lass, sup it up. Mak thi grow.”

Enjoy the day - more later

Scoffing braadwort in Belgium with Uncle Festa

2006-08-15T02:20:00.000-07:00

What exactly is an ironmonger? I’m 61 years old and this word still holds one of the unsolved mysteries in my life. But.....at long last the answer could be at hand.

See, I’m soaking wet as I’ve just raced at Eastway in the rain, so I want to get the bike stuffed into the car so I can scuttled across to the showers and get warmed up. But..... the guy walking away from the next vehicle could well be an ironmonger.

He looks normal though….and young….and that makes it more intriguing still as I thought ironmongers went out with Steptoe and Son. But there on the side of his red-painted open flat-back truck, yes right there on the door is the word Ironmonger.

As a journalist I guess should know these words and what they mean but I struggle. Here’s another. Let me read you this item from a daily paper last week: “There seems to be something furtive and solipsistic about downloading your journey times from National Rail Enquiries online.”

Well I do it and I wouldn't call myself solipsistic because….I’ve never even seen the word before.
Sod the ironmonger, that can wait. I need to get these wet things off. I’m happy as I came third, my best result of the year. The rain slimmed down the field big-time but who cares. Still third.

Mind, last week in Belgium it was totally the opposite. It was hot and sunny and I got a kicking. Dropped with three laps to go and then finishing on my own. I hate that.

There was mass of riders for this one, the best part of 90-100. We were all tucked away from the rest of the world world on minor roads round Bonheiden, all barred off to traffic. The little was as square-shaped as a brick, so that meant four full-on accelerations out of corners per lap…and loads of laps.

Uncle Festa was not best pleased to find me not being there at the end, given that this was a world championship, as me and Dougie were supposed to be riding as his lead-out men for the sprint finish.

As things turned out, he had to look out for himself. He was near enough to the front and anyway he was happy soon enough as, pretending to have something wrong with his finger, he went off to First Aid. He was in there with a Chinese nurse forever…. I’d eaten a braadwort the size of table leg before he got back, onions, mustard and all. And I could have scoffed a second.

Dougie never even rode, he only showed up for the photo afterwards. I knew that would happen. He’d been in Ostende over-night with Lorraine. It’s all fruity and hush-hush. There’s a construction link in this triangle. That can come out later.

Dougie works on a magazine. He’s never heard of solipsistic. That makes me a bit better.

Parents hand out £18,000 to their kids, to give them a start on the property ladder. That's on average. Did you see that? I hope our two did.

Here at work, Tex got an offer-to-go and she took the money and got started. But little brother didn’t. He thought he was saving at such a rapid rate of knots that he could afford to turn his windfall down. That was two years ago. Since then, no matter how fast he coins it in, the goal posts move that much faster. Mum still washes his socks.

You seems to have this insatiable appetite for the nutters I work with and what they do. Well….

You’ll never guess what we found in one of the cupboards here, behind the tins of spam…..a couple of Russian brides. We wondered if they were ordered up by Mr Sorehead before he left, but failed to match up to his expectations. They must have survived on tinned meat for months. Julius took them both home on the train, so that was nice.

I've been up the town drain as I had a call up to meet Mel Zuydam, he the finance director at the Highways Agency. The message was that he wanted to give me two ponies. I thought that if they were Percherons I could give them to Julius. You never know, he might be getting married and that would be the present solved.

Buttons has got frisky. She skips along behind my desk and then does a leap into the air when I can’t see. But I can. She tried to jump right over the security barrier next to the desk by the front door. They’re mending it right now.

No cicadas in my porridge....just treacle

2006-08-01T02:12:00.000-07:00

Here I am looking at this big pan of porridge. It’s coming closer and I’m at the right end of the breakfast table, the near end. The other ten cyclists, especially the tapering souls preparing for la Marmotte, are further back down the line. They’ve probably hi-jacked bigger bowls than me……anyway…..

…. as I’m squeezing the treacle bottle (liberally) and mixing the gold steam in with Guy’s Scottish offering from the kitchen I have this twinge, well sort of pang of concern about Edward Scissorhands. I’m out in the Alps, up on the Col d’Ornon, and my mind is back in the office. Ridiculous. He sits on my left and his parting shot was “While you’re off I’m going over to the other side, I’m becoming one of them.”

So I’m visualising him in pink when I get back, with ear-rings perhaps. I’m picturing a Buffy-look. Certainly not a return of Tamara Press. That would be a surprise. But anyway I can take in my stride, like already on my right sits a guy who was previously known as Marilyn (he keeps telling me like it’s a fable) so I’m pretty broad-minded over these things.

Mr Sorehead has moved on and is now working in the Middle East and he wants to reclaim his spam. We’re due to move office and we’ve started packing and we’ve unlocked a big metal cabinet at the back and found 163 tins. He’s welcome to the lot.

You’ll remember Buttons, she with the goats in the loft in Putney and an angry neighbour with no shrubs as Button’s midnight forays (with a head torch that was once mine) to smuggle in greenery having denuded every bush with greenery within 300 yards.

Well, there’s been a riot and now there’s something of a make-up going on. You heard about that charity “durbar” in Richmond? No? Well it was an auction where they were looking for bids for this pile of elephant dung, enough to fertilise half of Kent. Well that would make things grow….well, regrow.

The neighbours sent Buttons and she got chatting to Lakshmi Mittal, steel billionaire….like rich but sadly ignorant of the existence of Contract Journal (well until Buttons collared him, that is) and he heard her plight and put her in touch with the elephant dung provider.

The result? She’s got a big barrow and has half the bushes sitting in shxx. And she’s bought a mountain bike.

I must just tell you that when we were having supper that night back in Sean-Jean-de-Maurienne at the end of my big long charity ride, that 13-hour marathon in the saddle, we were 30 at a long trestle table or three and I was sat reasonably near mine-host Jonny Wates as he had the red wine bottles and was splashing it about liberally and then I’m getting a hissing in my ear.

It was the hotel patron. Who is that girl? Well I hardly knew the answer, except that she was awesome, like she’d done the entire route thus far without being big on cycling beforehand. We all recognise her, they said. Well he said they said. But I certainly didn’t.

So I ask about. This Chrissie girl, who is she? Steve giggles and says he calls her Determinator. I work out the joke. She’s German. DE…Germany. And she’s so focussed. Somebody in the know says she is Chrissie Dietsche and is a world champion-type at something else like surfboarding. No wonder the guys with eyes think they’ve seen her face on the box.

Julius has had Appollo Screed (otherwise known as Appollo Creed) down at his hovel in mid-Kent (if it had windows I would call it a house) for the weekend. I don’t believe it….they’ve been getting themselves more and more wound up with my story (Twinkle-eye says I should say post) about the duck-gun and the nuts and bolts and the wooden punt on the farm back in Northumberland. They’ve Googled loads of bumff and have now started making one themselves.

You start with a thick plank and then axe the wood out of the inside by hand with this special tool. An adze. Well, one of these Japanese women who chase after Julius must have tracked him down because there’s now this video clip on his website of him stripped to the waist in the privacy of the back garden. Working.

It seems that the Japanese national tourist office is being inundated with enquiries. So they want to set up helicopter flights to Kent as well as to here at Sutton. She’s been asking HSS to price scaffolding and stuff so they can build this secret observatory. Hey, this is confidential. Don’t let Julius know.

The Welsh Woman is back but the bad news is..…she’s not been cured. It’s failed. The private tuition in Italy to learn to sing in tune, well it didn’t work out. She was down at the bottom end of Sutton High Street, this was yesterday, and the great unwashed, the general public and our people, all came running up the hill, hands to their ears, this is Carolyn and the rest. I didn’t get it at first as I’m pretty deaf in one ear and I was stood facing outwards.

That reminds me, and I’m not so deaf on this one. I’ve been teased for years about not being able to hear crickets on a hot summer’s day. The kids could point them out for me, no, they’re not there. Anyway, here I am in France, driving southwards back down the peage to Marseilles airport on that blistering Friday afternoon. The windows are all full down. The hire-fire Megane is nipping along at 150kph and what do I hear….this noise. Incessant. Just like house burglar alarm but everywhere…on, off, on, off.

It’s millions of cicadas. All singing/scratching/whatever in harmony. Then I’m stopped in the blister-hot motorway service station and it’s more-so. I’ve never heard these things before in my entire life and it knocks you over. There in every tree. If they can get themselves in harmony like this, why can’t the lady from Wales? Perhaps I could catch her a few.

I live in a cul-de-sec. The newspaper says that’s a problem. Statistically, people who live in cul-de-sacs weigh 6lb more than others who live in proper streets and lands and whatever. So anyone who wants to go tapering in order to ride the Marmotte or a big cyclosportif like that had best not start off from a cul-de-sec. You listening Dave?

Despite the warning, I have to say that I like living in a cul-de-sac.

Amazon have delivered my music, the CD. I’ve got Liam O’Flynn at last. It took well over two months. Also, I’ve got some Greek red wine. It’s lovely. It complements the palate when I’m playing my 4-hour special video, the one of the Tour de France doing Stage 16, my stage. It was Stef Steffanou who wanted me to try it. Cheers Stef.

Oh…..more adventure to announce….and I’m in danger of moving myself into post-dinasuar mode. You already know I signed up to TalkTalk, that was 12 June. Well after serious discussions with a guy they have, this is to a call centre in South Africa, as I found I’d been billed for broadband but didn’t have it….I got this cardboard box through the post with all the necessary gubbins. Hey, this is next day service. None of your Amazon two-month wait here. Pretty cool TalkTalk.

So I’ve looking at the cardboard box, well at the CD in the box. All the instructions are on the CD, it says, but my computer won’t play ball, the CD hole is a failure. So I told Annett and she’s coming to sort it. Lee as well, he’s also in IT and he’s a happening guy too. He’s blown his shoulder apart in a mountain-bike crash so I hope he’s mending up.

Before I go, I have to tell you this snippet…just picture this. Here I am sitting in Marseille airport. Everything is in place: the charity ride is done and the Eurocar hire-mobile is returned. Mind, my 1000 euros deposit doesn’t get handed back but I understand there’s nothing to get alarmed at so I’m cool. The hard black bike bag and the luggage has gone off somewhere and I’m reading l’Equipe and thinking about a second coffee.

The only couple sitting here about, like me in this little patch of shade, are my age, well OK 50-ish. I’ve never seen them before in my life but ask them the time. Then the guy hives off to the counter and the lady turns round and says: “How did you got on? Did you manage the ride?” So I start to talk, as you do, but I sort of feel this is really strange.

Tour de Force stage 16 - the final part

2006-07-17T07:54:00.000-07:00

For the second morning running there’s this cycle-world cacophony on the go. It’s not even dawn, not even cock crow and I’m lying in bed listening to a shadowy clacking in the ether of feet in clip-in shoes and toilets going a-whoosh.

My open back bedroom window brings more sounds from the cobbled yard. You’d easily think a team of placid horses, Percherons perhaps, were being settled in to drive the punctual we-never-go-late delivery of mail to Paris or some big city far from here.

Yes, the Tour de Force, with all its trimmings, vehicles and riders, is on the move again. The do-it-all champions tackling Stage 17 will leave town by the low road. There is the harder option, as we could see yesterday from the signs, of a higher mountain to the north, taking in the Col de Madeleine, but that’s not on anyone’s agenda today.

Certainly not mine. I’m still in yesterday, Tuesday, in my own little a Stage 16 time-warp. That big effort got me. So close but still so far.

As no-one else is eating these tasty hot mini-croissants I grab another four (let me be honest with you…five) of them out of the basket. This hotel does proper butter. And ladlings of serve-yourself jam in an open glass dish.

I have a serious decision to make. It’s like this….I have one mountain left in my legs. Just one as there’s a carry-over burden that is going to restrict today’s activities. It’s called fatigue.

That means a choice.

If I want to get back to my car, I need to cycle over the Col de la Croix de Fer and I’d like to do that as it’s a lovely climb. But what about the closed tunnels? Well I’d just have to bluff it when I hit those stop barriers. I’ve been in and through pitch-black tunnels before where you can see nothing, absolutely nothing. Jason Edwards can vouch for that.

But that would mean going sketchy here on the blog, implying that I got to Toussuire and so earning my sponsors’ big bag of oats. Like I could wax lyrical, like I could ask Ted what it looked like up there and copy his second-hand picture to paint into this here blog-zone.

Or I could simply ride up to Toussuire and think it from there.

Toussuire wins.

So I’m in the kitchen with the hotel patron, Gilles Toutain, and he’s a grand guy. I’m hoping none of the other cyclists can hear me in this far corner as this is all sort of embarrassing. He’s happy for me to try out my French, that’s a bonus in a French patron who can do the English. Well to me it is. Does he know if I could hire a (sshh, don’t you let on) taxi to pick me up at Toussuire later this morning to get me across and up to the top of the Croix de Fer….I’m guessing there is a minor link-road between the two that avoids the tunnel problem.

There’s four or five of them in here in some coffee-backed cup-and-huddle gathering. One’s listening mulcho and he gives me a card. Say, he’s a taxi man and yes he can and I’m to ring him on this number. It’s a deal.

So it’s 7.45am and I’m off. The blood on my left calf, from the horse-fly bite is a thing of the past and I have a shiny new leg for all of… 200 metres. Then it’s under attack again.

A truck passes with a trailer behind, the kind of kit used to collect unwanted/stranded cars. That’s fine. We’re coming to a small-town roundabout with daily-watered flowers where you’re none of you goes through fast as they are built to a tight-fit to make sure of that. On top of that, I’m going slightly uphill anyway. Another vehicle comes alongside me. It’s his mate, see, and it’s like nothing in this world is going to come between the two. So he passes, well part-passes and then cuts in.

He also has a trailer and the nearside wheel misses me by less than an inch. Only behind that there’s this crude-cut metal sticking with the tail-light gubbins attached and he happily brings it through me. So I’m up on the pavement sorting myself out and the car behind is calling through a window am I OK and I’m nodding.

Everything out there is on hold as the roundabout is full anyway. I’m thinking bad thoughts towards the driver….what I’d really like would be to fill his cab with a thousand horseflies then spot-weld the doors shut with him sat inside. I’d even get my camera out.

But the sun is out and Toussuire beckons and the leg’s going to be fine. I hope.

What can you say about this climb? Like the Col du Mollard yesterday, it will be the first time that the Tour de France has ever been up this road and it shows. All the way up, where-ever you look, it’s like the ordinary people have voted “Welcome”. Even on the craziest of old barns, never mind the tidy garden fronts, there’s something cycling. Mostly some old bike trawled down from the attic, rusty and unridable, but found and hung up to see.

One is fully decorated with light-blue pom-poms and another isn’t a bike at all as the farmer has gone all creative and has produced a make-believe item out of two old cart wheels, a scythe and other bits from his yard…and the bike chain must once have been cut out of the bed of an old-fashioned muck-spreader, though I don’t think many of you will know what they even looked like. We’re talking living history.

It sort of feels like being in a happy place.

Listen, if you want to feel it you can…..you should do a cyclosportif called the l’Ardechoise. There’s no really famous cols so why is it the most popular one in France with 11,000 riders? Well I’d say that it’s the ambiance of the place, the yellow/purple bunting they hang up for you in every village, the accordions at the feed stations, the road-side singers with microphones….yes, all this for the riders. You go home wanting to return.

The morning is quite splendid. Backache-easing halts today are fine, a bonus almost. Lying down in the grass and pushing up the shoulders reveals…. a splendid panorama of mountain tops all around.

So….Toussuire at last. The road flattens out nicely and then it’s totally level. Alpe d’Huez is a vast bulky place, and intrusive, development-rich, brown-painted mud splat set in a glorious landscape and Toussuire is battling to become much the same.

Someone has recognised that there’s a few hundred acres of flat land up here at a great height and that means potential, so what might just as easily have been clagged on the coastline in southern Spain might just as well be dumped up here. I mean to say, if you’re going to develop the entire world, you may as well start with the best bits. You might be guessing that I’m not a skier. If you are…then sorry for the outburst.

There’s a fake chuffer train on the road, all painted white, with fake carriages, all painted white, six of them trundling along like ducks in a row. There’s a driver and a passenger. She’s in the fourth carriage. We’re on the complete flat and you could land a plane on the tarmac, it’s that wide.

But hello, what happens next is deja-vu. The ghost train driver comes past and cuts in, which means the snaking line behind him follows suit. It’s automatic, like a wave effect or a whip lash. You know. Two carriages come closer and hey, look and see, I’m off the bike, already across the curb and standing in a doorway for safety. More carriages come through and I see the exact spot where me, the ghost cyclist, would have been hit. But I’m not there. I’m here instead.

The driver gets a smile as I’m just happy to be in this place. There’s a serve-everything place open on the left and it’s doing business. Parasols and tables. Yes, coffee would be good. Grande tasse. No nearby tabac in view so no papers, no cycling to pour over, no copy of l’Equipe to devour. But they do have something comparable…. an issue of the Dauphine Libere for coffee-and-sunshine sit-and-swiggers like me. So that’s fine, I sit and swig and dig, taking in both coffee and news in eager gulps/spadefuls.

The Tour de France action is more sensational than mine. Yes, another coffee and a two-bowl ice-cream as well. Lemon and raspberry, please. I do that in French. So this is it at last - I’m celebrating.

There’s two girls at a table at the other corner. One keeps crying a lot, then calms herself and talks some more into her mobile phone. Perhaps she’s being told they can’t do TalkTalk here in France. Anyway I turn towards the sun and bury myself in the cycling.

That’s it….you can stop reading now if you wish.

Although I’m in mission-accomplished mode, I’m also indulging in a bit of what-next thinking. Like I’m here and my car is over there and two conversations with the waitress and a man have confirmed the lack of any back-road link to the Croix de Fer.

So it’s back off the mountain by the same road as I came in, all the way down to St Jean de Maurienne with its peaceful roundabout and back to l’Hotel de l’Europe. Will that taxi deal stand? Oh excellent, it does and he’ll be by. How long? Trente minutes. He’s muchly on time and I’m pleasantly surprised at how he flicks out my front wheel. I thought I’d be doing that and only then after a discussion. Like you don’t expect that from an ordinary taxi man.

Bit by bit, I see he’s very much not an ordinary taxi man. Like, as we spot the road up the mountain, over there to the right, he explains that the best-used climb up the Col de Madeleine isn’t the best at all, it’s far better (and harder) on the second road. It’s the lesser-used one. I’d been thinking myself from the carte verte (green map) there could be two.

Then he’s saying that his group sometimes do a big day out and get themselves to the Col d’Izoard and back. Another big one being to Col d’Iseran. This is most impressive as the Iseran is on my “still to do” list and is one of the three highest cols in Europe.

So here I am, a cyclist sitting in a taxi driven by another mustard-keen pedaller. His card says Taxis Roux and he’s Pascal Roux. and he’s taking me up to the top via the Col de Glandon valley because the tunnel detour if we went the other way would take far longer negotiate…we’re talking Col du Mollard I can see.

He quoted me 50-60 euros though I’ve not exactly said where I want to be.

It’s a lovely day and stopping off on a taxi on the very top would be too embarrassing, so we settle for a corner 1km from the top. That way I can arrive looking the part. Well, almost.

There this mighty flock of brown sheep with deeper brown flecking in and amongst it…that’s the goats with bells and stick-like horns. A shepherd watching over them. Crouched. He’s the real thing, old-fashioned garb and a stick that could have come off a Christmas card. He’s been watching it all.

I get up there and he gives me a funny look. He must be puzzled as he was crouching in exactly the same spot yesterday and I’m here again wearing exactly the same top. Only I think he’s more decorative than me. You know these pretend-statue people who dress up and act like they’re frozen, they’re often in Covent Garden Square and the like, all in grey face-paint, and you give them money….well I think that’s what he’s really at. He’s sure attracting the car-spill tourists and he don’t move much at all.

Not like the cyclists. Let me paint this little picture…off the top of the Col de Glandon there’s a gentle drop-off before you reach a T-junction in 300 metres. When I was here yesterday I went left which climbs some more to the top of the Croix de Fer, but today I’m going right to swoop big-time back down into the valley that holds my car. It there somewhere in the medium-to-beyond.

Its hot and sunny and there’s cycles everywhere. At least 30 parked up for a breather right on the summit, in the little Glandon car-park, and another 50 guys parked up having pizzas at the restaurant place down at the junction, their bikes spread out on the hillside, plus another 30 actively pedalling up the short bit of road in between.

One of these is putting in a big-time sprint, he overtaking like there’s some big deal going down. He’s in a mostly black strip. It’s that new Caisse d’Epargne kit that Alexandro Valverde rides in. I still like last year’s strip better with its multi-coloured panelling. Green, red and yellow. It had a holiday flavour.

Well this guy spots me and starts shouting wildly which is surprising given that he’s in a sprint and anyway there’s no problem with me and him having enough room. And he’s still shouting as he comes past so I slow up and then stop….I mean the day’s over for me and this is all retro now.

So I’m there when he turns back and pulls up. It’s Gilles Toutain, the patron from the hotel, the guy who appreciates a customer who likes to try out their French and who got me sorted with a taxi. Star man. So he’s another cycling nut!! What a small world. So we get a good – but short- chat. I know there’s a cyclosportif that takes in the Col de Madeleine only I’ve wondered where to stay. I think that’s sorted.

As for the rest of the day…well I got back to Bourg d’Oisans and the car was just fine and as the only house really overlooking the little gravelly car park built for eight cars had its shutters all firmly close I got downside from public view and stripped into normal clothes there and then…..and when I looked up all the shutters on the house were open and a 70-year-old couple were both on the veranda watching….but a thunderstorm broke overhead anyway and so I quickly drove away. Amazing, I’d been off the bike no more than five minutes.

Up another hill, and come 4pm I’m getting the new low-down from the various riders staying here. This back at the King of the Mountains and most guys are here getting ready to do the king-size cyclosportif called la Marmotte. That’s on Saturday, three days from now.

The two cake-queens from Farnborough & Camberley are still here, tapering madly and they can barely make it through the door by now. It’s OK guys, I’m not letting names slip…I’ve only had the offer of £10 so far. Your secret is worth far more.

Andy from Eastbourne, who I’m sharing a room with, is well psyched up. He might even do it a day ahead of the crowd as he doesn’t fancy 10,000 others on the descent off the Col de Glandon (like down the valley I’ve just pedalled up……pause for loud cough…. errr OK, taxied up….but I’m trusting you with my secret….well, but I did it yesterday for real so that counts).

There’s two more Eastbourne and they too are Marmotting….they’re also tripping off to some nearby viewing gallery where (in the below) two dogs are each digging a hole and if the two dogs’ holes become tunnels proper then one dog will be the first to get its paws into a little outdoor cannabis production unit. It’s quite a chuckle.

During the night, Tim and Sally drove here non-stop from Worcester and they are even more Marmotty as they’ll be doing the Marmighty on a tandem no less. Wow!!

Poor old Paul from Huddersfield (Blackmoorfoot to be precise) and his side-kick from rugby days, that’s Dave, are the only ones (apart from me) not doing la Marmotte. They’ve never heard of it. They’re here to just enjoy the rides and the cols. Which is perfect. But little by little they’re getting suckered in.

For me though, it’s over. The achievement is in the bag and if anyone needs some of this lovely home-made cake its me.

In the sitting room, the tele is running. It’s live Tour de France and it’s in French so there’s no commentary by that dreadful David Duffield.

Ahh, sweet bliss.

The tour in pictures

2006-07-17T02:49:00.000-07:00

Stage 16 of the Tour de Force tackled on Tuesday 4 July by me and eight other riders....and riden 15 days later by the Tour de France itself on Wednesday 19 July.

Halfway into the 4-hour climb to the top of the Col de Galibier. Greenrock's support van was in la Grave and driver Joe Mearns took this snap of me and the yellow top, with la Meije towering in the far distance

Yellow-painted and carved out of granite, there was a reminder of progress at every kilometre point as the winding road made its way up the valley below the top of the Col du Glandon

The Col de la Croix de Fer has fabulous views....and a cafe. Throughout the whole 13-hour ride I only ever came cross two others from the party and here they were at 5pm tackling a coffee. Giles (standing) and Ted (sitting and fighting a battle against sore knees).

Tour de Force stage 16 - coverage of the afternoon

2006-07-14T08:15:00.000-07:00

Things started with a bang, well more like an explosion to be precise.

Here I am, up and over the Col du Telegraph in fine style (that’s not quite true as it was something of a struggle) but anyway I’m absolutely zamming it down the far side. If you’re out there reading this Annett, you’d have loved it as it total zigzag, one high-speed bend after another.

But then the front tyre blows out big time. I control the first part fine and get my speed down, thanks perhaps to semblance of air still waiting to get out, but the second half of the slowing process is close to getting the better of me and the whole front-end gets to wobbling and I can’t seem to lose any more speed as I don’t dare to brake harder than I am doing.

But I survive and spread out the contents of my cavernous bike bag across of handy rock and get on with the job. For me, the worse part of this is finding my glasses to see what exactly it is I’m doing. But today, all goes well. Giles flies past to say that Dave is on the way with the van.

I mini-pump enough air in to make a decent fist of re-starting. Dave arrives with a track pump but it won’t work so I ride off saying that once it’s fixed he can catch me and we’ll get at my front tyre properly then.

See…I’m thinking that I’m wasting time as I need to be on Giles’ wheel by the bottom of all this as we then go into a long stretch on a valley bottom and there might be a head-wind and Matt’s not here. But Giles is. Well, nearly.

So I do a big-time number to catch him, you know like you see the pros on the tele, really bending the bike over on the corners and then immediately up on the pedals giving it something solid in a big gear to grab back some speed. This treatment might work on hard tyres but suddenly I see my bulk, the whole mass of me plus bike plus everything taking a wider circle round the bend than the rim of the front wheel.

I hear the metal of the rim touch the tarmac and oh, no, I’m coming adrift…and there’s an oncoming car. I throw everything the wrong way and hope, though I have to confess that I’m visualising my slid-line if all else fails. But it doesn’t all fail. The tyre reshapes itself and I feel very lucky. Perhaps it’s made of rubber that has previously featured in Wallace and Grummet movies.

St Michel de Maurienne brings me into the flat-lands. Infernally hot flatlands, as I’m soon to discover. The road off the Col de Telegraphe arrives at traffic lights and it’s right-turn for me to follow the valley floor for miles. The river is l’Arc and it carries round rocks, snow-melt and the rest westwards until it runs into the bigger river, l’Isere.

We’re to stay down here as far as Saint Etienne de Cuines, which is where we start up again for the Col de Glandon climb. I reckon I know what I’m doing so the plastic-clad route-planner stays packed away somewhere.

Every mile (or kilometre) on the flat is good as there’s a limit to how many miles we have to do today. I’ve just noticed Greenrock put our tally at 202km. Before, it was to be 182km. Hey, that was a sneaky move, somebody.

It might all be slightly downhill but there’s this awesome headwind to face, like part of the Mistral has torn itself off its leash and is exploring its way up the side-valley. And its so hot. There’s the peage right alongside which you might expect to take all the traffic, but every bit and bob of what we’re on is either a slip-road onto it or a slip-road off it, so there’s big lorries and clutter and so much dust. And blistering heat.

I see a white van and anticipate seeing it stop but it rattles off to the right and I never see it again.

I believe I should go through St Jean de Maurienne to reach the next climb. What I really believe here is that my subconscious is quietly telling me that our hotel tonight is in St Jean de Maurienne….i.e. I can slope off and lie down. So I turn into St Jean de Maurienne but have a twang of conscience and stop to look at the route-planner.

It’s vague. There’s no detail. Well, what I really mean to say is that I’m trying to read it without my glasses.

But hang on, there’s two lines written in bold print. Two warnings. Caution level crossing says the first. Then the same again on the next line. I’m really trying now. Ahh, I need the railway on my left but I have the railway on my right and its disappearing fast. So I turn back.

Saint Etienne takes forever to appear. I’m looking up at the valley side on the left as our little road will be going up there somewhere…but it’s a solid mass of rock. No chance. Another few miles….and still solid rock on the left. It’s like were trapped in the bottom. You could film a cowboys and indians massacre in this sort of territory.

I’ve found the valley at last. Now this will be really something. I’ve never been up here. I’ve seen the Tour de France on the tele coming down the Col de Glandon this way and it looked spectacular so here I am live in the self-same spot at long, long last. It’s live living your dreams.

What we have is a lovely backwater valley, following a small river, le Villard, which started its days close to the top of the Glandon. There’s just two little villages in the entire stretch, St Alban-des-Villards comes first and then St Colomban-des-Villards.

It’s hot and getting hotter. I use the mobile phone (dinosaur hunters take note of that…you can take me off your kill list) and ring Joe to say I’ll be out of fluid in 30-50mins. I’m still wondering where that white van went.

Dave arrives ahead of parchment and I drink a whole bottleful straight down and set off with the same again.

Higher up and I’m clean out again and the promised second van-man meet-up hasn’t happened. Someone must have appeared higher on his needs-list. At least I got the tyre done properly at the last stop, though I’m moving too slow to notice the difference right now.

My legs are shot. I don’t know if it’s the heat or the carry-over of the Col de Galibier climb or the push along the valley for two hours, but it’s like the gradient is 1-4 degrees harder than it should be me according to my mental map.

And the flies. The friggin’ flies. I don’t know if I smell like a Mongolian yak or what but I’ve got at least a hundred of them, you know the little black ones that cows flick their tails at on hot summer days as they stand on pools. But I can live with them…it’s the sodding horseflies. They’ve tracked me down and I can’t ride fast enough to escape.

If you get anything useful at all from reading this blog at all, then this is it. Take note. Horseflies hunt in pairs. If you do succeed in swatting the little bastard that’s appeared as a blip on your pain-screen and you do hit it and see it splatter onto the road and feel jubilant…then don’t because there will be its mate/a second one diving into you already.

Think location. Think equal and opposite. If that one was lower left leg, ankle-zone, its mate will be to your rear, out of sight, busily extracting yourself from yourself somewhere mid-thigh, right leg. They even come through my shorts.

What I said before about this valley, can I take it back? I’m thinking of that film Deliverance…weren’t they about to flood the whole place. Well this would be a good setting for that sort of thing. If only I’d been wearing Erroll’s black trousers, the one with those bat-box pockets……a rider with a posse of bats swirling for protection would shock the little horrors.

As the top comes into view, I’m aware that behind, by a bend or two, a rider has been slowly reeling me in. Joe is at the top with the van and he say’s its Ted and Ted says “Gotcha”. I see a grin as we overlap, both hands diving into the same box of recovery bars together.

This is the Col de Glandon and the next summit, the Col de la Croix de Fer, is only 2km away. Ted pedals away slightly faster than me now, but with a throw-away line saying that he’s planning a coffee stop when he gets there. Good. The Col de la Croix de Fer is heaven on earth. Any cyclist with taste should have his ashes spread there. The views and the ambiance are superb.

I savour the short ride to the next summit but I’m not sure if Ted has stopped as all there is outside the café is a pair of bikes in mating mode, enmeshed in a handlebar-facing embrace. Still I’m off in there anyway as I’ve earned a 15min “moment” as it’s gone 5pm and I’ve been on the bike all day.

There’s Ted and Giles inside and Ted stands me for a coffee. He’s a nice guy. Next news he’s in the corner bartering over the price of a new top. They have a whole rack on offer, some with a lovely Col de la Croix de Fer emblem on them. The one Ted has been wearing for the past month sure is humming a bit.

He puts the new one on and I think there’s no going back now, what with that body sweat on it. It can never go back on the rack. Ted’s negotiating an all-in price for three coffees and the sporting top. He’s coming in low and the lady’s not sure about it all. Ted’s offer is rather ridiculous so she laughs, slightly nervously. But then she’s happy, it was all a bit of fun and the sale is done.

So how come Giles was here? He’d not even been on my horizon. We’ll he’d stopped at the last place, some restaurant/pub thing at the last T-junction, and had a pizza. Bloody hell…time for that and him a non-cyclist. What do they make chauffeurs of these days?

Ted is hopeless at descending. He’s bellowing to that effect in my ear at 50mph as we zoom down off the top, round the string of hairpins leading to St Sorlin-d’Arves. Giles isn’t though, he loves it. So do I and we go diving off together. There’s no sight of Ted at all.

Eventually we ought to wait up, now that we’re a sort of unofficial threesome. This is early evening and we all want to get somewhere sometime. I know there’s two more judgements to take. The first is when you leave this road, which is heading straight back to St Jean de Maurienne (and the hotel…so tempting to think food and bed) and take a right-hander to climb up the Col du Mollard. You blogsplats who have been here from the beginning will already know what that is. Mule-track and all.

Giles and I get to the crucial point. It’s not crucial at all because…the quick road to the hotel is closed. Its tunnels are being widened, so its no go, even on foot and Giles is happy to wait while I set off up the Mollard. I’m anticipating the need for at least two stops to lie down and tackle this backache. So they should soon get back on….but they don’t.

The sign said the climb was 5.5km and the Tour de France bumph I read beforehand said 7km….either way it’s a surprise to be at the top first, though I do spot the pair of them riding two-bends lower at about my speed.

Just over the top and in the small attractive ski village of Albiez-le-Vieux….as opposed to Albiez-le-Jeune further down the far slope….I wait up on the village green. Well it’s actually tarmaced but you get the idea. There’s a horse-trough and some road junctions. For us, we go left.

The guys arrive and buy into the water flow and I’m bemused as to how come Ted lost so much time on the descent. So he explains…it was a phone call to the wife. Say no more.

Another flying descent, same routine as before, Giles and me letting it rip, each alternately having spells of greater daring, Ted left talking to the plants.

I’m inclined to let Giles come through knowing that a fortnight ago when the descent was used professionally, Ludovic Turpin took a tumble and broke his femur. And Dennis Menchov also came off…..say did you see him yesterday in the Tour de France? He was storming up that final climb in the Pyrenees. But that’s unfair, so I gee up again and take my fair share of the risk.

After just 5km on the right-hand flank of the river, this one is l’Arvan, and we’re back in St Jean once again. Joe appears from nowhere in his white support van and we all stop for a well-deserved breather.

For me the choice is no choice. At the T-junction just ahead of us I could go left and spend two hours climbing to Toussuire, the finish point, the ski-station with rather a lot of attitude at this time of night. While if I go right, it’s a gentle 400m freewheel down to the hotel and as it’s already 8pm and the meal is on the table and my legs are protesting muchly I declare my hand first. I’m going right.

Ted holds firm, plunges his hands into the goody bag and sets off up the hill. Giles wavers. His determination to stick by Ted might have held all the way down the valley but now I’ve declared my hand he opts to do the same and in next to no time we’re sharing a splash of red wine over a well-deserved meal.

More to follow.

Yellow jersey rider makes it home

2006-07-14T03:43:00.000-07:00

This is the closest you get to proof.....me and the bike and the special Tour de Force top.
I did it. I got myself over the finish line in 15 hours.
That was one big long day and some more....it needed a 2-hour spill over into the following morning to reach the final destination, the burgeoning ski-station of Tuissuire.
But its done and that's £10,500 for charity.
So a big, big thank you to all for your generosity.

Tour de Force stage 16 - report on the early hours

2006-07-13T07:54:00.000-07:00

Hey, it’s only 4.45am but there’s a guy already on the move in the room overhead. Hell, it’s still dark outside. The group plan was to start from Bourg d’Oisans at 7.00am and as our hotel is up here in Alpe d’Huez, 13km away, there is a 30-min high-speed descent needed just to get to our start-line.

I’m feeling like the odd one out as I have a hire car parked outside.

Last night, Russell was asking me how long it would take to do Stage 16 and the best advice I could offer him was the same time as Stage 15 plus two hours. Stage 15, selected as this year’s Etape stage, was from Gap and took in the Col d’Izoard, Col du Lautaret and Alpe d’Huez.

I suddenly thought that with the La Marmotte taking me 13 hours, then if I added two hours to that, I’m looking at a long day. Could be 15 hours…so with that thought, the man upstairs in the dark got me up and on the move ahead of plan.

I hive off downstairs and find….a bunch already munching away eagerly. It’s like I’m a late-comer entering some beaver colony.

Steve Young looks totally immaculate. I just don’t know how people do that…and he’s ridden every stage so far. Russell is inside cling-foil, well wrapped for the cold descent. There are two girls pounding about, one I’ve never seen before, the other recalls me from that evening meeting we had last autumn. I’m trying hard to remember her name.

The car. I tell you what, I was a total stranger to this here Megane’s internal workings yesterday. It was like operating an alien…but today, thanks to 21 high-speed corners, downhill that is, it’s all getting familiar and I’m overtaking the occasional lone vehicle when we’re just 50m from an oncoming 180-degree corner, all this based on the fact that I dare leave the braking later than him. It’s a worrying tendency but it surfaces more and more as I get more adventurous….. and as I still fail to catch the cyclists who left the hotel before me.

Now I’m on the bike. Parking a car up for two days with all your luggage in the back has an element of risk. Well for me it does…and there are two main strands to this risk.

First, after two days I will have forgotten where I left the vehicle. Second, after two days I will have forgotten where I put the keys.

Don’t laugh too hard…. you’ll all be aged 60 eventually.

I’m targeted a time of four hours to get from the start, here in Bourg d’Oisans, to the top of the Col du Galibier, up there in the sky.

After one hour I reach the first big pond. A dam. It’s the Lac du Chambon. The side road to the right leads you up to les Deux Alpes, while the road to the left, through Mizoen leads up the Col de Sarenne where, you may recall from earlier posts on this blog, those dreaded horseflies live.

I’ve already had an incident. It was as two Italian lorries passed me, all loaded up with logs and each with a second articulated part being trailed along behind the rest. The road was winding a lot as we were climbing through the Gorge de l’Infernet. The second spaghetti shouldn’t have overtaken at all as there was a blind bend to the right, so an oncoming car got a mighty shock and blasted on his horn.

So the Italian dived my way and I had no escape route. You know how the French sometimes just pile tarmac on tarmac until it is two-foot high. Well it was like that here. Between me and the rock wall to my right was a big drop-off for flood water.

It’s funny how when you get on a cycle, to the rest of the world you go invisible. I sometimes think some nuclear physicist should look into that. I mean, if they really want to know if Iran is building nuclear bombs, why don’t they just send a few guys on bike to check it out. No-one would ever spot them.

I’ll suggest Dougie Addy goes to check it out….see, I’ve got his training bike and it would sell for a Powertap, thinking that he just might not come back if my theory doesn’t hold. And Uncle Festa could go with him…that way I’d no longer be saddled with giving him lead-outs in races.

Another hour sees me into la Grave….or as it likes to call itself la Grave le Meije. I’ve always been puzzled by that. It’s on literature….like there’s this fabulous shot of a snow-capped mountain peak with the moon showing behind it. Suddenly it all falls into place….out to our right is the self-same view. That is the mountain. La Meije. It’s fabulous.

By a happy coincidence there’s a white Greenrock-branded van here, one of our two support vehicles. I knobble Joe Mearns who is happy enough to take a shot of me. It turns out to be the only photo of me on active service during the whole day. Want to see it? It’s the best proof you’ll have.

I’ve been carrying a “day bag” on my back thus far, waiting to see how the weather would pan out. In fact its gone from bordering on chilly at the start to the promise of prolonged blistering heat. Joe takes my bag and I’m grateful for the loss of weight. He tops up my bottle and I get a banana. Two. No-one else likes the ones that are well brown so there’s a fair choice. Brown bananas are unbeatable. Absolute perfection. I’m very happy.

A third hour beckons, all of it on the same road, and I’m anticipating this to be the worse hour of the day but it’s not at all bad. See, these three hours are on the N91. It’s a route national, running between Grenoble and Briancon and beyond that Italy. I guess we got off so sharp this morning that the traffic is still very light. Certainly those uphill tunnels I struggled through in the second hour were not too bad…you’re in them forever and traffic noise absolutely booms in your ears and you feel you’re about to be run down from behind.

Now, the sun is directly ahead and is getting stronger. I have a tendency to forget my lip cream and they bubble up and blister, swelling to twice their normal size. Perhaps that’s now I first got the tag of horse-lips.

Ey up, the Col du Lautaret is in sight, still a long way off but with an easier gradient in the run-up. We’re supposed to have a breakfast stop here to compensate for the early start. I’ve had this picture in my mind, right from the word go, of tables and chairs and bacon and eggs and a welcoming cheer from other riders.

But the place is totally deserted and I’m crest-fallen and I just ride through. I was at least banking on a drink as I’ve shifted everything I had while getting here and now I’m going to be tackling an entire hour up the Galibier with nothing at all.

The road forks and I leave the N91 at last, getting onto the much pleasanter mountain road, appearing on the map as the D902. I look behind, casting one final look over the place that should-have-been-but-wasn’t….and there’s Joe leaping about in the road so I blaze a retreat.

His MacWhopper of a white van is clearly parked next to the road. He must have thought me totally nuts not to have spotted it. In the back there’s bags of trogladite offerings. Some of the tasty little bars are smashing. I even pocket a wrapper of one to buy some of the same at future events. Perhaps. I’m into monkey mode as well…. as I spot more bananas.

I have to say that both Joe and Dave, the latter is driving the second support vehicle, are totally supportive, not just in provisions but in attitude and that’s nice because you feel a sort of glow every time you find yourself getting close to them. There’s supposed to be a motorbike as well but I seem to be off his radar. His duties must either far behind or well ahead. It’s French guy who’s the driver and he spoke to me last night. He’s wearing a black leather jacket. Somewhere.

Joe tells me there are nine riders out on today’s Tour de Force, four ahead of me and another four behind.

I think those in front are Russell, Steve Young, the German girl and Giles. And the others, you ask? The mind dims….I’ll have to get back on that one. What I can tell you is that back home, Giles lives six miles from me, in Capel, and he’s just finished university and he’s not really a cyclist….in fact he’s here as the driver of Johnny (Miracle Man) Wates’s car and he’s only on the bike because the Miracle car is out of action, stuck in some remote garage by all accounts.

I can’t believe guys like Giles can just get on bikes and ride so strongly. I mean, this Russell guy has already got himself a cult hero status in my mind.

On the Galibier proper now and into the last hour of the climb. It’s warm sunshine and no traffic, it’s just up and then up some more. There’s a distinct swarm of pedallers, all of a sudden. All I can presume is that they came up to the Lautaret by car, parked up, and rode from there. Not that I blame them.

I find myself alongside a German who, relative to me, is loaded down by clutter though I don’t perceive a tent amongst his bulky load. When we work out that neither of us are French and switch out of that home-soil language, communication does improve. He’s doing a nine-day circular tour based on Berne in Switzerland and he proffers an impressive total mileage….well over 1200km. Hang on, how can you have a mileage based in kilometres?

My pulse is running 10 beats higher than at any other time today, yet I can’t believe it’s the legs as I don’t have the strength to push harder. Perhaps it’s the altitude factor what with us being at over 2000m.

So I’m on the top. It’s magnificent. Well worth the effort. There must be about 20 other cyclists milling about on the Galibier. Now to descend, so on with the blue waterproof top that I have in my back pocccccck…….hang on where is it, I don’t want to chill.

Razzm, it’s in my “day bag” which is in the white van which is……nowhere to be seen. At least I have my full-hand winter gloves. That’s one item I can never be parted with.

The descent is huge, fast, wonderful, so fast that I can’t also take in the views any more. Plan Lachat comes into view down below and I recall having cup of coffee there once in the past, while toiling upwards, in what was little more than a sheep shed. There were wonderful chunky, crudely-cut planks on the floor and nothing else.

Zooming on and zooming on some more, I swoop into Valloire, a mid-mountain resort, where the road is block by some mad woman who seems set on having herself run down. She just won’t budge. I brake hard. But hang on there, it’s our nurse who is out here to pick up the Tour de Force pieces, if necessary. I’m forcibly forced sideways and thanks to the intervention I see…. our the Greenrock support van parked up. Ahhh…it dawns on me at last…. this is the lunch stop.

I have to go on record here, Dave lad, as saying that your baguette, probably out of the oven for less than minutes and so crunchy, banked up internally with brie and tomato and mustard, was the finest I’ve ever tasted.

Did I want another? You bet I did.

I then sort of slid under the van, like a dog slinking backwards into its kennel, and just lay there in the shade. I said it was to ease the backache but in truth I was just in need of being out of the saddle for a few mo’s. I’d done the Galibier and no-one could take that strike away from me. It was on my tally-card.

Tackling the Col de Glandon is coming next.

My plan has been to reach the bottom by 2pm and get to the top at 5pm. I’d not really thought beyond that but now it was slowly dawning that there might be a shortage of daylight to complete the two elements still beyond that. But I’m living the here-and-now and I can only focus on one element at a time….and that is the Glandon.

Over the previous months, it’s where the adventure really starts. The fingers have tapped out plenty for now………….but the next part should be hot off the press tomorrow so don’t you run away.

So this is it.......heading for Alpe d'Huez

2006-07-12T09:38:00.000-07:00

Rather than swamp you with one massive report of my ride through the Alps, from Bourg d’Oisans to that finish line in Toussuire, to that podium place with a mountain backdrop and that cheque for £10,500, albeit money for charity, what’s better/more manageable would be a daily series of bite-size portions.

So I’m breaking the whole thing down into readable sections. You might just get more sense out of me that way, though I doubt it.

So here’s the start, the build-up.

Flying out to Marseilles with my bike in a hard case marked the start of a new world for me. Never flown with a bike before.

They give me a seat in the back row and I’m looking out of the window onto the blue Channel below and then Paris and then the Alps. Wonderful, I’m babbling in French to the French lady from Provence sat in the next seat and she’s very tolerant….given that she’s seriously into fashion and I’m not (though you might already have guessed that).

We’re on the 3pm flight out of Gatwick on Sunday and she’s been stock-taking in her two shops in London. I’m to go there and introduce myself and say I’m a friend. Mmm. A few problems there, like remembering her name.

She points out Mont Ventoux but I’ve already recognised it. I think of our ride there, the cyclosportif, a day with mist towards the top. Of struggling to hold my speed on the climb and of a voice behind suddenly saying “Hi, John” and seeing Hsu Min-Chung come steaming past. The dog. Where is she now? Gone back to marathon running and still drinking the kir are you, Hsu?

At Marseilles airport, I’m so relieved to see the bike box emerge. The rest is irrelevant. As long as the bike turns up I feel I could ride it without tooth brush or towel or clothes. No, cancel that concept. Anyway, everything gets spat out, bit by bit, and next I’m crashing about, pin-ball fashion, with a wide-and-overloaded trolley, to get out through the exit and track down Eurocar.

A minor nightmare. The bike box won’t fit in the hire car. But Eurocar are nice. The girl upgrades my allotted vehicle to a Renault Megane, still in the same price band, but that bit bigger. And the guy in the sun outside struggles to set it up at the back so the box will push in through the Megane’s rear flap. Excellent. No, I don’t give him a kiss. Or a tip.

I’ve never driven a French car in my life and he gives me my instructions in French in all of 20 seconds and as he burrows off and I start her up, I’m pretty sure that I don’t know what I’m doing.

All I’ve understood is that these four buttons set in my door will wind up/down each individual window and a strange tube-driver’s handle is in fact the handbrake. The rest I’ll have to guess at, or press on a trial-and-error basis, I go along.

The challenge is to get to Grenoble before dark, otherwise I’ll have to experiment to find out which buttons do the lights so I’m zamming up the peage in this oh-so-silent Megane with the needle stuck at 150km and no-one else in the fast lane for miles. It’s mid-Sunday evening, the sun is beautiful, the mountains loom closer and life feels just wonderful.

You’ll never believe where Matt and Colette live….it’s like being up at Alpe d’Huez only with the hill transported to the very outskirts of Grenoble…just take the first turn off the main road once you’re through the flat parts of the city and then up you go, 8km of endless U-bends, a terrific little road that lead up to this alternative civilisation that has perched itself up on a mountain ledge. It the world ever floods big-time, this is where you’d want to be.

I sent Colette a text from Marseilles saying I’d report in again when I passed Valence. If you’ve fallen off your chair at this point, please take a moment to compose yourself and recover.

I’ll say this slowly….I have a mobile phone. Not only that I can even use predictive text. So there’s hope for us all.

I actually call back far later that I promised, to say I’m in fact virtually there, like half-way up Colette’s mountain. I’m at the junction leading to the Col du Coq, a mere stones-thrown from their house.

Then moving again, round another bend and I’m suddenly into a tunnel. Damn it. I instinctively stretch out a hand and turn on the lights and wonder how on earth I did that. But this is a narrow country road and the tunnel is even narrower and there’s an oncoming truck and suddenly I’m being asked to make two difficult judgements…how close is the car’s far side to the wall and how close am I to his on-coming-and-sticking-well-out front wheel.

I survive, drive on, spot the Route des Etablissements and there is Colette stood in the road, right opposite the red fire hydrant (which I would have missed). Wonderful. They are in one of two brand-new spanking properties in a side road with no name, as yet. No wonder she had doubts.

Matt, as you know by now, is an IT whiz, moving to Grenoble a year ago to do R&D. I’m told (no names) he has these flashes of such blue sky thinking that he can arrive at work at whatever time he fancies. That’s good because we talk and talk of this and that, up to bedtime and again in the morning.

I have to say that I’m bowled over by the Powertap concept that Matt and Colette have signed up to. I must contact Ric Stern and get one incorporated into one of my back wheels. Great for training. I coach Will Thomas and he knows someone with one. I need to invest some spadework on this front.

Matt confirms himself as a nutter of the first order of mightiness by telling me that he cycles to work. That’s up and down the mountain…so a 700m climb back home on a night. Wow!! And all in club kit…..the spanking red, black and white colours of…. Old Portlians. Most impressive.

For you who know Colette well…I have to report that she is sparkling. The bulge is growing and, having taken up the offer of fully knowledge, it is known to be a boy. The pregnancy cravings do not include either Guinness or fried snails…. more a wish to get back to that Powertap. I’m wondering if I might just sneak off with it.

They tell me that the best way to Bourg d’Oisans is through the Uriage valley, it’s the scenic way to reach Vizolle. So Monday morning and I’m off through Uriage which reminds me of what I imagine Harrogate, another spa town, should have been like but wasn’t. More like Malvern.

Apart from getting lost in Vizolle, the drive goes well and just 400m from Bourg d’Oisans itself, with the fabled zig-zag road up to Alpe d’Huez showing up on my left, snaking up the steep valley wall, I turn to the right instead.

This is the Col d’Ornon and at the top I stop and unpack by hard black bike box.

I’m in a cellar, in fact, with a semi-circular roof made of stone and all painted white. It’s not a wine cellar but but a tailor-made indoor play area for school children….originally that is. Yes, I’m underneath what was formerly the primary school that served a tiny community that thrived on the few fertile acres high up on the top of this mountain pass.

Helyn leaves me too it, saying to come up for a coffee and some cake when I’m ready. For me, this is a worrying moment…….as you know when I pre-assembled the bike into the carrying box during my practice run, I stripped the thread on the handlebar stem and everything was floppy.

But this time it works and I surface upstairs with a tremendous glow. There’s already several lazy dogs plundering the food, like sitting on the sofa watching the early hours/days of the Tour de France.

Two of the pack know my name!! They get emails from me, sent out via Glyn at Surrey League. They are in Farnborough and Camberley club and are here for the Marmotte next Saturday. This is Monday and they are tapering already. From the amount of food they’re stuffing in, I’d say tapering is the wrong word as it’s just the opposite.

I should really keep their names under wraps as their wives/women/admirers think they’re off on a week-long management course in Dorset. But if anyone cares to pass a £20 note my way, I could happily spill the beans.

Guy invites me to do some blue sky thinking…..and over the coming days I do…lots of it.

Guy and Helyn are (by what seems to me to be an amazing coincidence) also members of Old Portlians CC. It’s a small world!! Helyn came to some of the coaching sessions I do for women racers in the winter for Surrey League.

That was a couple of years ago now. Today they own and run this splendid base for cyclists with the wonderful title of King of the Mountains.

There’s a website so I don’t need to spell it all out…just you click on www.kingofthemountains.co.uk

There are about 12 beds here and everything is tailor-made for cyclists who want to explore the various big climbs, the Col d’Ornon itself being used by the Tour de France, fairly often, to lead riders into Bourg d’Oisans so they can then finish the day’s stage with a customary thrash up the climb to Alpe d’Huez.

Now I’m going to let you in on some of my blue-sky thinking….yes you dear blogspat out there reading this, I’m doing my first piece of marketing here and now and it is aimed at you. So I want to know what do think to this?

What I’m planning to tell Guy (wearing the hat of his corporate marketing guru) is that we/they/he should set up a website branded as King of the Mountains….with due reference to the chalet tucked away at the bottom, of course.

It would/will/might give a running update throughout next season (ie 2007) on all the times clocked by UK riders who come over to this part of France to tackle the famous 21-hairpin climb to Alpe d’Huez for themself. I mean you can’t really be famous if no-one knows it! You might even have a photo on the wall but that’s only limited fame.

So…here it is….you turn up at the start, drive yourself up the hill and clock a figure of anything from 55mins to more than 2hours. Then get yourself to a keyboard and enter your details. There it is. Your result. You’re in there, one of the famous and all your friends can see that you did it.

But to go one step further, what do you think of a team section on the website, you know….. the aggregate time of three riders from the same club?

To whip up interest over the winter, to have something to go at, a standard of sorts, we ought to have some teams out there this September. So how much interest would there be in a three-day package (flying you to Grenoble and staying at the King of the Mountains) with two days on the famous climb.

Think of it in terms of the Grand Prix….you set a fast time in practise and then go a minute faster the following day.

Who wants to go first? Do I see VC Meudon clambering to be the champion team? Not you, Colin Summerfield, you’re excused, but you can send out your nimble club-mate, that Guiseppi Guerini look-alike…..in fact we could even have a section for a 3-man team made up of riders over 50.

Tell me if all this has the potential of being a good idea. I’m on john.leitch@rbi.co.uk

If so, I’ll have something solid to put to Guy and Helyn.

But to move on....

By now it’s 4pm on Monday afternoon. I’m heading up Alpe d’Huez in the car and I’ve spotted my first Tour de Force rider. I stop to encourage him. He’s bemused that a French registration car has a driver who knows who he is.

I later discover that this is Russell and he’s a farmer from Nottinghamshire. He’s done every stage so far yet 12 months ago he was barely cycling. What a star. It just shows what you can do.

Staying at Alpe d’Huez is fine, like the views and everything, but the hotels, as you might expect on a massive, over-developed ski-result in summer, have a slightly ghostly air about them. It’s as if no-one has put a key my the bedroom door for months, like the place has been entombed ever since the last skier went home.

One by one, our riders stream in to big cheers and clapping. Ted (a Big Brother wannabe) has only been off his bike for half an hour and he’s got his hair shears out and Russell’s son’s lovely locks are rapidly becoming a thing of the past. Welcome to the world of the shaven headed, son. I can assure you, you will regret it.

Steve’s here as well and shakes my hand. He’s also done the lot, star man. He really ought to join Redhill CC and get serious about cycle racing.

There’s still time for me to get in a warm-up before the warmth leaves the sun today and so I head upwards from Alpe d’Huez to the tranquillity of Lac Besson, a climb of about 40mins. It’s lovely here, just me and half-a-dozen fishermen spreading themselves around the water’s edge.

All around us are the mountains and tomorrow I hope to be up amongst them myself.

More coming your way soon. Stay tuned.

News flash: did it in 15 hours!!

2006-07-10T10:30:00.000-07:00

A brief message to say that I’m back home from France and that I did it….I rode the entire stage (Bourg d’Oisans to Toussuire) and it was very hard.

It was 6.44am when I got started, rolling out of Bourg d’Oisans and four hours later I got to the top of the massive Col du Galibier. It was all lovely but the final hour, in particular, was absolutely marvellous.

Then, all afternoon I toiled up the valley leading to the Col du Glandon and on to the top of the adjoining Col de la Croix de Fer where I had my one luxury of the day….a 15 min halt for a coffee in the café on the very top.

Early evening and next came the 5.5km climb of the Col du Mollard. No longer on my own, I now had two others for company.

So….its 8pm and I’m stood close to a T-junction on the edge of the peaceful valley town of St Jean de Maurienne. To my left is the turn involving a 2-hour climb to the ski station of Toussuire, while to the right is a 400m downhill freewheel to the hotel.

Greenrock’s white van is alongside, with fresh water and other supplies, but my legs told me I’d never get up the climb. So I went to the hotel for a meal and bed.

But the missing link was on my mind all night and next morning did it…two solid hours of additional climbing and at 10am I finally rolled over the finish line. Toussuire. It was a long time coming.

This, dear blogsplats, is more of a brief news flash than anything else….you know what it’s like on your first day back at work, there’s masses of things to do. I’m going to write a fuller report just as soon as the system returns to normal.

Right now, though, I must close by saying thank you to everyone who sponsored me. It was a daunting task and I’m only too pleased that I got there in the end…the details of my high-speed explosive front-wheel puncture en-route and the attack of horse-flies can come later.

Best be moving. John.

Worrying about a loose screw....that's me

2006-06-29T07:06:00.000-07:00

Here we are then…this is it, the count-down. Just three more days and I’ll be off and then, in a few more blips, I’ll be out there. Live action. Pedalling.

I’m already nervous in all sorts of ways. I tell myself I shouldn’t be, but I am.

Look at it this way, mate (a voice tells me) it’s like this….you’re at Bourg d’Oisans in the morning and at Toussuire later that day, well OK, that night. It’s simple, you just keep pedalling. When it hurts, then just think of all the nutters sat there back in the office.

No. No. My mind won’t rest or come easy as there’s a flood of “what ifs” unsettling the prospect of calm. What if I turn up and have forgotten my pedals, or forgotten the key to unlock the case the bike has been packed into, or most worryingly of all, what if I strip the thread on the bolt when unpack and I spin the handlebars back into position?

I must tell you, on the quiet, that I’ve created havoc in that department. The handlebars were brand new. Anatomic. So less pain across my left hand. And a new stem too…but I didn’t like it. Too flimsy, the whole set-up rocked when you did a mock sprint or dug in hard on a hill.

Anyway, for my first trial packing-up session, I had to give it the full works, slacken everything, to get the bike the squeeze in the bag. So when I reassembled it, what did I do but over-tighten the screw. Hey, it’s not me that’s strong, it’s that this stuff was built in some light alloy…I’ve just been eating some Greek halva which had more bite.

I read a book last year. Vernon God Little. It was fantastic. I only wish my novel had been that good.

I’ve packed a new book for this trip, for if it rains. It’s An Evil Cradling by Brian Keenan. That’s because Sue Knight recommends it highly in her own offering, NLP.

I’d never heard of NLP when she sent this book that she’d written through the post. It’s fantastic. And she’s another cyclist. I’ve never even met her but she sent me the book. For free. People can be so kind.

I put what I’d learnt from her NLP theory into practise for the first time when I interviewed Vaughan McLeod, chief executive of Ennstone, for a lengthy two-page feature article for work. He was moved. At the end he said he’d never had to think so deeply for a long time.

Only I’m already half-way through Brian Keenan’s book and I’ve not even packed never mind got myself to the airport to start sitting about. He’s the guy who was imprisoned in Lebanon for years on end. My mind blows up/disintegrates from time to time, just like his, and it’s good to see how he handles it.

Thoughts flash. Keenan. Ulysses. The Irish. I was born in Yorkshire but I must have some Irish fibres, resonance or vibrations.

Like Irish music…or what they do with it. Like the night I heard Sean McGuire in Wooler. And now I’ve recently re-connected with uillean pipes. And Planxty is back, thanks largely to Arthur McBride. That’s the song. You’ve probably picked up on that by now.

Invigorated again, I’m trying to track down Liam O’Flynn. Where do I have to go to hear him?

What I have done is track down an Irish woman, though. She’s a star and she’s now in Grenoble.

Colette is the finest racing cyclist I never coached. We almost got started and would have if it hadn’t been for other things. She had a narrow escape there…and duely went on to get a fourth place in a World’s B road race championship.

Listen, I was doing this Surrey League cycle race one day, a few years ago now, all round the quiet roads west of Dunsfold village it was. So we’re on the edge of Surrey. After a horrible drop to a tight corner there was a huge attack every lap, but then when we got into flattish park-land it all went to soft. Too soft. So, not liking to be contained, off I went on my own. It was too hard and I knew it, so would no-one else be mad enough to join me?

I’m getting up to a corner and sneak a glance and there’s one rider bridging across. Coming out of the bend, I accelerate only slowly so to get them on my wheel. I drive it for a while again while the new friend recovers, then pull over to assess where we’re at.

It’s hard but there are two of us now and the gap is reasonably rewarding. Who else is as daft as a brush? It’s Colette.

After a couple of years of no-see I’m thinking she might hit the trail on July 4 with the Tour de Force as Grenoble is close to the Alps and the Col du Galibier. And yes, she’d love to only…..she’s well pregnant…like motherhood in a few months from now, so hardly in any condition to rack it up the mountains or go sliding down the far side on any loose gravel.

But Matt’s game and so Colette is up for bringing him over. He’s mustard and he came and met us all in Megeve last summer and did the big ride there with us.

Mmm, that’s a statement of fact but it’s rather thin on the truth, though.

Sure, by exchanging of text messages we established that we were within 100m of each other in the starting line, like amongst 2,000 riders. And sure, eight hours later we were in the same sports hall scoffing free pasta and chatting, reliving our day. Only Matt had done the king-sized circuit in the same time as I had done the mid-sized option. My total climbing was 1,100m less.

So Matt is well quicker. Hence, on July 4, anywhere with a headwind and I’ll be right behind the dear boy. Tucked in. Oh and yes, he’s into IT, like he's a professional, so I could explain my computer needs fixing, in fact I might re-pack and get the thing into a corner of the bike case.

There’s this café at the top of the Col du Lautaret, where the day (in my mind, that is) really starts…. I could quaff coffee and a king-sized horsemeat sandwich, perhaps, while Matt gets me sorted ready for TalkTalk.

I could sing him Arthur McBride. I might take my fiddle. We might meet Liam O’Flynn. I might eat some more halva. You should know that it was Stef Steffanou who slipped it into my hand…say what’s in this stuff? Will there be a drugs test?

Ey up, it’s time to go. Byeee.

Seeing Toussuire on the tele

2006-06-14T06:11:00.000-07:00

Well, well, well, I’ve now seen the road up to Toussuire, the ski station in the French Alps where I will be finishing on 4 July… have you?

It was on the tv. It’s a cracker.

The big cycle race, the Dauphiné Libéré, was on Eurosport last Saturday, right after the women’s final in the French Open. I was out painting the shed at the time but got the final 12km on video.

It was hot and everyone looked all-in, thanks to the three earlier climbs in the day, but orange-clad Iban Mayo was unstoppable. His Euskaltel-sponsored shirt flapping in the wind, he simply rode away from fellow Spaniard Alejandro Valverde.

The views were fabulous, all those distant high peaks with their scattering of snow.

I guess the biggest alarm was what happened to Ludovic Turpin. He came off earlier, on the descent of the Col du Mollard and broke his leg, his femur to be precise. Loose gravel also brought Denis Menchov crashing down. If that’s all the result of smartening the place up ready for the Tour de France, I hope they take heed and take action and sort it before we arrive.

By contract, some of the road up to Toussuire was a magic carpet of freshly-laid tarmac. It’s like Tousuirre has won the lottery. It’s a Tour de France stage finish and is no longer an unknown. Hurriedly investing millions in upgrades to its facilities in order to re-position itself higher up the list of top-places-to-ski.

Hence the yukky amorphous-grey zones, bulldozed flat and clear, areas that once carried vegetation (I guess skiers hate trees). And multi-storey blocks sprouting up into the sky…a bit like La Mongie but with a bit more paint. Development-is-us.

If you want to read about the race, try this

Want an idea of what the weather is like up amongst the hills…particularly the Col du Galibier (our first climb)?

Here’s a shot with a snowy flavour. And another

finally…here’s one showing what I’m hoping it will be like for us on the Col de Glandon

I think on that happy note I’ll quit. It’s all getting closer up.

More news later.

Star-man Gary left waiting for his reward

2006-06-07T08:15:00.000-07:00

I had been hoping, by this point, to have put a big thank-you in Contract Journal to Gary who works for McNicholas (that’s McNicholas the green type).

Here I was on a long Tour de Force training ride, an hour or so from home and passing through Loxwood and getting worried because the bike had moved on from squeaking badly to emitting an on/off juddering that comes before seizing up.

McNicholas had three guys working by the roadside and not only did I get lubrication squirted into all four of the bike’s potential culprit areas by Gary, it was done with great enthusiasm. I parted with a cheer, with hopes for a good day.

I thought I should salute my helper by singing his praises in CJ. That would call for a photo and a surname and a job title and all that.

So I contacted the company and spoke to the vanilla-level PR. As I/it/this was graded as upper-level stuff it would have to be handled elsewhere, at the manicured-voice-level PR.

Pause and then call-back. Now a super-smooth investigator is taking over the reins. I picture the guy flipping through some catalogue for silk underwear as we speak.

That was a fortnight ago. All came to naught and Gary remains an unsung hero. Well, at least you blogsters now know about him.

Next.

You’re following this week’s big cycle race, the Dauphiné Libéré, aren’t you? Well I’m not here to give you a run-down on the stages thus far in what is a dress rehearsal for the Tour de France, but rather to flag up the fact that the route on Saturday (June 10) is pretty well identical to Stage 16 of the Tour...the one I’m doing.

Like they will tackle the Col du Galibier, the descent to Valloire, the run along the valley bottom followed by the second big climb, up the Col de Glandon. Then they take in the Col de Mollard and finally the rise to the ski station at Toussuire. For the organisational teams, it looks like giving them a dry run for the real thing.

What with the tennis, the French Open, being on Eurosport pretty solidly, there won’t be any live coverage of Saturday’s cycling, so (sadly) nothing to bring you right into the picture for the Tour de Force.

I’m into the final month. Preparation runs on in earnest.

One long westward training ride took me as far as Old Winchester Hill and back…so I got to ride through East Meon and West Meon. With names like that, I was expecting to see aliens with big shiny heads. But… disappointment in that respect.

And yesterday’s marathon saw me reach Selsey Bill, the most southernly point in the south of England and home (so I’m told) to Patrick Moore and telescopes.

A new twist was to take an entire aluminium tray of Morrison’s flapjack. Family sized. Eight pieces in all and I scoffed the lot in a late afternoon munch-up. Today, I’ve been getting a new set of teeth fitted…any link between the two, you should know, is purely coincidental.

More news later.

Forced to walk the plank

2006-06-02T05:36:00.000-07:00

I’m on the water. Yes, out on the salty brine with some a-splashing going on down below. But up aloft, me and the bike are fine. Keeping dry.

See…I left the little road and then just cycled down an overgrown path and then out along the beach…..I know, I know, not exactly what you’d expect of a road bike…..and then stopped by a little wooden post. Then waited and sure enough the ferry came.

Listen, this is all part of another big training ride. Another long one, another record breaker in fact. And now there’s just him, the driver, or I should say the pilot, and me and the flat slab we’re floating in. It’s something akin to a punt.

It’s lovely. I was once on a farm, this is on the mainland in Northumberland, right next to Budle Bay and Holy Island, for a story, and the farmer had a well-used, well-rusted punt gun on the wall….and a rabid mountain of nuts and bolts nearby, a collection of cheap hardware that he put into it (or at least his grandfather did) to fire, to splat as many wild duck as possible in a single shot….and then he showed me the very punt he drifted out on. Well, what I’m sat in right now reminds me of that. Hey, you still out there, up there Mr Currie?

We leave dry land, firing off engine first and I’m puzzling over how the guy does that when suddenly he flicks us left, then and right, and I’m facing the front instead. All proper sailing. Across the water lies West Itchinor. It’s costing me £2 in shekels to cross the Chichester Channel…..it opens up new territory.

So it’s on and on to West Wittering. What a lovely name. It conjures up an image of The Wittering Mass and an image takes a shape in my mind….yes, I see dear Geraldine in full flow.

But it’s got to raining and two ramblers are sheltering in a bus stop but I WILL see the open sea. Beyond West Wittering the road leads to a private beach where it’s been half-upgraded into poser-esque standard. There’s a new word for you. Poser-esque.

You have speed humps on the tarmac. There’s surf boards in racks, with flags and a wind that howls straight off the sea. So I resort to peeping out through flashing-and-shaking marram grass. Hey, what surf.

I go paddle in puddles to clean the gunk out of my pedals and head for home. Back to the ferry and then another four hours to go. What, all in the wet?

I’m splitting into a new fiver. He smiles at the £2 income and that’s my day’s food money nearly gone. There’s only me on the ferry again. And a dog. His dog. It’s heavy wet and it settles next to me. I decide that if it shakes all over me then it’s likely to go over the side. But all is well.

It’s high tide and I can’t even see the marker post as we come in. The pilot (see how I’ve upgraded him now) pulls out a gang-plank and it sticks out at the front. Bloody hell, perhaps he could read my mind, of what I was thinking of doing to his dog.

But no, he jumps into the shallow water, drops the far end of it down….and I do walk the plank…but all in a good cause.

Being a few shekels adrift, I need to do a deal in the Bosham mini-mart. I want to trade three Mr Kipling flapjacks for the two pound coins I seem to have tracked down in a back pocket. It seems people don’t like to negotiate over food. Too triviata….well I want one coin left for Wisborough Green, just in case.

While I do these worthy things, the rest off the office were behaving like weirdos as you’d expect. Edward Scissorhands is having trouble sleeping. At 3am he’s wide awake. Listening to birds chattering (not that I’ve ever heard birds chattering at 3am) and when it’s time to get up he’s asleep because he’s been awake so much when he should have been asleep.

The only sensible answer (I have to agree) was to move the bed into the office. Well that bemused Lady Penelope, like was it legal or whatever. And HR got involved. Like they do. Seems that they’d have trouble defining whether he was sleeping on the job. No worries there, I said, I already do that. Lady Penelope gave me a hard stare.

Erroll saves the day with one of his sheds. So it’s right outside on the grass, over a posey ring of daffodil bulbs. Just 50 yards from the office door. OK, fifty metres. We’ve even put hippo-grade electric fencing round to save him from 12-foot lizards. And from cats. And from Claire Moody.

Twinkle-eye’s mother has been over twice with early morning toast, so that’s nice.

Mule track looms....with a steep gradient

2006-05-25T02:53:00.000-07:00

The Col du Mollard has suddenly reared its ugly head….and it looks like it could be rather painful.

You know how it is sometimes, you sign up to things in a state of euphoria and you happily ignore the detail, the fine print, and its only later that you discover snags, nasty little horrors that you just can’t wriggle away from. That’s where I’m at right now because this French magazine has just arrived and right in the middle it’s got the low-down on our little matey, the Mollard.

The particular day I signed up to do, with the Tour de Force, seemed to have three hard climbs. For the likes of me, that’s more than enough. I thought the fourth climb was ignorable, sort of there in name only, like it was just a splash of minor uphill during the descent of the Col de la Croix de Fer into the valley far below.

But not a bit of it. Here it is jumping off the page in Le Cycle’s big feature item devoted to a full low-down on the 10 hardest Cols that the Tour de France will climb this year.

The feature is sub-titled Le col muletier…which sent me scuttling for the dictionary and guess what… it means mule track. The adjective is muletier, muletière and that’s followed, dictionary-wise, by sentier muletier which comes across as mule track.

Well with that in the heading, you can guess what’s coming in the text. Yes….pain. Sure it rises to 1630m but look at the gradient….there’s six kilometres of climbing and the last two are the steepest in the entire Tour. Oh no!.

Here’s a snatch from the text:

Les passages les plus raides dépassent la barre des 11%. Le pied du col grimpe progressivement sur trios kilomètres d’une route étroite et en mauvais état.

Le col du Mollard est proposé pour la preière fois au programme du Tour 2006, et il se peut que de nombreux coureurs soient surprise par sa difficulté. De plus, ce col se situe juste avant l’enchaînement à la montée de la Toussuire.

I think I’d rather not know all that...I wonder if the hotel serves meals until midnight

Out to Butser Hill …..a hippo-grade effort

2006-05-19T03:35:00.000-07:00

At last...my training rides have broken through the eight-hour barrier. Only I’ve still got to get the figure up higher because the day of destiny, the Toussuire Tuesday, on 4 July looms ever closer and it’s going to be one long brute of a day.

In fact, I need to devise some way of being under way extra early. Like at the crack of dawn. Sunrise in Bourg d’Oisans should be around 6.30am – 7am. I must be there.

But for the here and now, the joyful news is that I got to Butser Hill and yes, I got up it. Starting off from home, here at the foot of Box Hill, it was South Harting first stop. Fresh water and a quick sandwich.

Then south of Petersfield and I’m tracking along lesser roads to get to Oxenbourne House. Butser Hill comes into view on the left. Up there in splendid solitude. You go straight up it with this panorama, this massive grass-covered chalky spread to your right. It’s exactly what the South Downs should look like.

Once over it, I’ve always then beaten a track for home, but not so today. I still need extra miles. So its off further to the south, to Rowlands Castle.

Next time, one time, sometime, the aim is to see the coastline, to get myself onto that cyclists’ ferry that operates to get you across the water to Itchenor.

Now that really is an ambition. It only runs in summer and it’s no more than a glorified punt - think of a coracle only built in plastic. Think of the upturned roofs cut from a couple of Skodas.

East Marden and I’m back on familiar territory. I can get home from here without a map. But this is were things go wrong because at Singleton I fail to find food or drink and my bottle is long dry and the sun is blazing down. Which means I need to get myself to Kirdford before the one shop shuts there.

This also fails. Kirdford has gone on early curfew.

And so I’m sat outside the pub with a glass and a plumber who is puffing – nay, belching - on a pipe. Could he be an elusive Polish plumber, I ask myself. I doubt it. Not here. I’ve not seen a pipe smoker in a long time and it smells lovely.

But it’s not the first surprise of the day because…there I was on a tiny single-track road with two horses in front being gently jostled onto the grass at the side by a wagon that demanded the entire road. It was… a coal lorry and going my way at that and with swag…a dozen bags of coal still to sell. And all this with the familiar coal-lorry weigh-scales and the coal-lorry weights, the chunky ones with a handle that Scotsmen throw for fun. I’ve not see this stuff in years.

The Tour de Force is close and I’m on the home run now. To mark it, I’ve had a whole weekend off the bike, probably the first since Christmas.

I was official photographer at a cousin’s wedding. This was at Hepworth, a village halfway between Huddersfield and Holme Moss. The groom looked straight at the camera for a shot or two, so they’re instant collector’s items. Other times it was like recording the final of a gurning competition. And while three bridesmaids were little treasures, the fourth insisted on being either wrigglesome or facing the action at right-angles. Or squealing. Or holding a packet of sweets. In garish blue. Or refusing a posy. Or making me dream of red wine. Or wishing I was training.

Uncle Festa went to a gay wedding in north Wales and is mulling over the possibility of coming with me to France. Well there’s a curious link. I’m down to be his lead-out man in the up-coming big races like the national championships. Perhaps he thinks I’ll disappear into deepest France with Jeannie Longo.

What about the nutters at work, you ask. Well, Whispering Sid is on the move. Off to a new job in Manchester. I think it’s something in PR and might have links with Claire Moody. Anyway it’s made Edward Scissorhands snippy. Well snappy. Well I don’t know. Funny thing is envy. Sid is the only person I know who uses the same container/vessel take a bath and have a cup of tea. Just let the imagination run a while. Good, you’re getting there.

Yes ladies, Julius is still stripping off at the window every morning and the Japanese tourists are flooding in to watch. Helicopters come and buzz outside the building. It’s £25 for a round trip from London City airport. Some try to land on the roof but security usually prods them off.

Twinkle-eye went to London Zoo to talk hippo-grade electric wire and its installation. He’s now run up three strands of the stuff, six inches apart, to keep cats off his orchids. Plus more strands along the top of his fence. And he’s got quite a killer-grade voltage charger to power the whole thing up.

What with George Burnett still getting pestered by those 12-foot lizards, i-Twinkle has even got to passing on tips. Hey, listen to me…this hippo-grade wiring is awesome stuff.

Training hard...and answering to basking sharks

2006-05-05T07:26:00.000-07:00

Training rides have got longer… and the upper limit now stands at 7hrs 43min. I got well beyond South Harting in Hampshire last time out, to within a whisker of Butser Hill in fact.
It was glorious to hear skylarks for the first time this year and that surest sign that we are on the brink of summertime…red campions flowering in the hedgerows.
Betwixt it all, I’ve had a cracking result in a weekend race. I got fourth. With one lap to go, I put in an attack when everyone else was wanting a recover. This was next to Outwood windmill with 9 miles to go. They let me go and all the way up that horrible leg-stabbing climb into Bletchingley there was no-one on my wheel. But I got caught with three miles to do. Well, the guy was a former professional, so no dishonour in that.
Just when I thought I could take weekend off, an over-due break from the training regime and blog-casting, I’m getting these emails from old mates, basking sharks and certain screwballs with an appetite for an update on office news.
So do I work amongst nutters? You decide. The Welsh Woman is leaving us. In fact as you read this she’s already gone. That latest arrest for singing out of tune in Sutton High Street triggered a whole gaggle of consequences. The upshot is that the Welsh Eisteddfod people in Llangollen have coughed up £200,000. It’s like a grant. She has to go to Italy for proper tuition by a tenor.
She was born in Blaenplwyf and the rural council has added £50,000. Well it costs them that much for redecoration… like every time she got home and warbled in the local library it brought the paint off the walls.
She’s got a bodyguard called The Badger…well he’s more Bernard Hineault than Kevin Cosner. They are a tandem act. He’s quit his job at Fitness Weakly, kitted the tandem with rest posts for her high heels and bought a one-way ticket.
Julius has cried at the loss. He loved the raven-haired one. He does babble.
Split Pea had moved up a grade in the meat-supply business. No longer supplier of just pigeons, snatched on a moonlight night from the railway cutting at Three Arches, near Horsham, he’s doing Canadian Geese. Big-time stuff.
The deal is that Hana, ex-sniper-with-attitude despite a job now in IT, comes and bags them six at a time. This is on the River Mole. He’s a big lad but his back-pack don’t half groan with the weight. The man pays in euros, sometimes in silk-wear. Julius acts as classifier.
I’m getting nowhere in the quest for tickets for any Liam O’Flynn gig but Tex has got me a dentist who does NHS Plus, so I’m getting close. Sometimes I get ether-lucky…like when I asked Google "where can I buy EPO" it gave me 46,000 offers in a nanosecond. I must talk to Dave Burleigh. The most mythical piper I ever heard was Billy Pigg but that was light years ago. Kathryn Tickell gets pretty close.
Erroll’s son has been putting frogs in Erroll’s bed and Twinkle-eye has taken a Canadian goose home for his mother-in-law. On the train. Only she said she prefers 12ft lizards so the Twinkler went off to his Elvis impersonators’ party early and left her to pluck it herself.
Wimbledon looms and sadness…. the Fiona-duo have no tickets. So we’re into team thinking and boundarylessness and the plan-hatch is to deck our Elvis impersonator out as a BT linesman (OK he can take the guitar) and hire a hydraulic lift from A-Plant.
We think that by casually driving up in the Wimbledon by-road we can hydraulic our Fiona-duo up and over the wall. So one of us has to contact Erroll’s son to get him to pretend to be Dad to get A-Plant’s George Burnett to put a machine for "Plant Test" or whatever. It’s a job for Buttons…she’s going to cycle past as school comes out.

Emile Georget - top man on the Tourmalet

2006-04-28T02:40:00.000-07:00

The Col du Galibier will be the first of the four big climbs on Tuesday 4 July when we tackle our own carbon-copy of Stage 16 of the Tour de France, so I’ve been getting a bit of low-down on its place in the Tour’s history.

The giant climb was introduced back in 1911 and the honour of being the first rider to reach the top went to Émile Georget who went up in 2hr 38min on 10 July. Climbing in a south-facing direction.

The Tour has now used the Col du Galibier 54 times…and that’s more than any other mountain climb. Probably because it’s such a brute. The top stands at 2645m above sea-level. In most year’s it’s the highest point that the Tour ever reaches.

Reading up on who-said-what about the Galibier, I see one writer pointing to neige éternelle and with snow in the depths of winter running to 6m-7m…I could do without any of that.

OK you’re wanting the challenge of a bit of French to colour the mood. So here’s a snippet straight from the mouth of…. Émile Georget, le gars de Châtellerault, premier coureur du Tour à parvenir au somme.

“Ća vous en bouche un coin!”, lance-t-il aux témoins.

Well, if Émile called it absolutely staggering, you can be sure it’s going to make me watery eyed. And remember he was the top dog that day, the King Frog. Also from 1911 comes this further eye-watering item…which starts with another reference to Émile...

Oui, et sans jamais poser le pied à terre, ce qui est la performance la mieux soulignée à l’époque, alors que le dénommé Julien Gabory finit pieds nus, car il a perdu ses chaussures dans l’ornière.

What!! The very thought of the bare-footed Julien Gabory riding without shoes, a result of having lost them in the muddy ruts, is quite staggering…..

As is the statistic which records that the riders who climbed the Col du Galibier that day back in 1911 were competing in Stage 5 which covered no less than 366km. They started in Chamonix and finished in Grenoble. Wow. And with no tarmac surfaces on the climbs…and some of them with no shoes!!

Other famous names to lead the field over the top of the Galibier, over the years, include Fausto Coppi (1952 and 1955) and Charly Gaul (who put in an amazing performance that day in 1959 – I’ll tell you more of that later).

One further name I should add is Lucien Van Impe (1979) as he is the one and only famous guy I have ever come across in my somewhat brief spell in cycle racing. To have raced with him is an honour for a minion like me.

Interestingly Van Impe was the first to go up and over the very top, the one we are aiming at, as prior to 1979 riders went through a tunnel 365m long, which had been built back in 1891 to connect the Midi with the Maurienne. It shaved the final couple of kilometres off the climb, running through the mountain at a height of 2556m.

Some years it was so cold that riders enjoyed the brief tunnel stretch because of the warmth of the fumes from the accompanying cars. The revival they offered outweighed the risk of dying from asphyxiation!!

And so a weekly top-up of the office gossip. On Monday, Appollo Creed (but known to us as Appollo Screed, well, this is construction) received a mystery parcel from the Lebanon. It contained empty yoghourt pots, all in different sizes.

Arabic yoghourt volumes must be different. He was in ecstasy because when you scratch them they give off new noises. Well, new notes. One is so rare a sound, or note, that he can give it to Alexis as a birthday present…they’re musical and do yoghourt-pot duets. But not in public. Appollo practices at his desk on Thursdays. He normally buys a pot from Sainsburys....so Julius and Split Pea both take a long walk to Cheam.

The Welsh Woman has been arrested again for singing out of tune in Sutton High Street. I’m not surprised. It is a ridiculous law, though, because they bang her up, threaten her with this, that and the other and what does she do…starts singing. In the cell. So the warder or whatever puts on ear-plugs (graded mega-strong) and lets her out. Then they slam the doors. She’s never been in for more than eight minutes.

Tex, our new arrival, has moved into post and she’s fished out most of the spam that was left in her computer’s CD drive. It’s crumbled badly and is hardly worth posting to Mr Happy who is now out in Hong Kong. He used it as a toaster.

2006-04-20T04:38:00.000-07:00

Training....with added horsepower

This is my biggest training ride since the last post on the blog. I’ve ridden through rain in the direction of the South Downs, taking the roads through Dunsfold and Kirdford. And now, by the time I weave through bends and pokey streets in Petworth I’m after food and a stop.
Four cyclists from London pull me over. They’ve fed already, snacked and ready to go. We talk eagerly and yes, they too got soaked in the same shower some way back. A dilly duck comes down the narrowest of narrow cobbled alleyways. She wants to reverse and park. We can all - except her - see that the car is longer than the space.
Reginald Molehusband are you still there? You’ll enjoy this. She comes in at one bad angle and up goes the car corner and into a side wall. So in she comes at the next bad angle. Another car corner tastes metal, grinding into street clutter, you know… the billboard and the flapper-on-the-pavement items that shops throw about and like you to notice.
So she gets out to shout at us. When you’re a cyclist on a bike, it’s like your invisible and you get driven at. Or through. When you’re a cyclist and resting up, it’s like you’re clutter. Dogs come and sniff you. Property owners wish you’d move away.
The friendliest guy points out that her rear tyre is flat. Not something she wants to hear.
I’m off and next news I'm up a narrow track in the hills. So quiet. No traffic here. I surface over the top and what do we have… one of these dog walking types with not one but five animals on elastic strings. So are they on a lead then or not? They defy the definition. I brake hard and snarl to myself.
There’s more… another guy with an Australian outback hat and his dogs are dafter still. They’re zapping round and round in circles. It’s like maypole dancing for canines. I’d not even started I wishing I could strangle him than he’s already bound to a tree. Then a horse rider appears up a bridle path. She says she’s had even more trouble than me with these elastic-lead types. Been thrown.
Before you could say "Stop" (or in my case say "Go On") she’d hauled three daggers out of her saddlebag and kerzipp….he’s pined to the tree. It’s like a circus act. One to each side of his head, close shaves, and the third through trouser flap between his legs. Pretty cool. I ride off smiling.
And so I’m in a field out of sight. Lying face-down on short grass. Back-ache relief, an exercise from Garvis Snook. I hear a muffle and face up to find myself gazing at horses. Lots of horse. It’s like I’m in Spartacus. There’s five horses in a straight line. One rider in the middle. Behind comes five more horses in a second line… with one rider in the middle. Then another five followed by… five again. What is this? It should be Chithurst in peace but it’s more like Chariots of Fire.
Garvis’s backache book says lie there and hold the stretch for 50 seconds. There’s no mention of any downside…like horses hooves pounding over your back. Talk about a pounding. I take a sligh knock on the head and must be slightly concussed as I’m sure I can see Jonny Wates. What? Out on a training ride?
Horses and hooves….that reminds me of Annett (see link). There I was sitting on the ferry coming back from the Tour of Flanders and this guy sat next to me asked me how the ex-model and ex-racing cyclist is. It seems he’s really missing those glamorous photos of her in Cycling Weekly. Not just him, he says, but all the rest of the guys from Brighton Mitre. So I pass on the info….married to Lee and into fringe rock band antics. No bike racing. It’s horses now. So safety at last? Sadly not as she’s had a tumble and broken an arm. They all wish her well.
Which also reminds me, there I was sitting on the ferry on the way out to Belgium, another guy leans over, when the rest had all gone, and says that Ray O’Rourke is going great guns thanks to the Mowlem-Carillion deal, thanks to the collapse of morale. He’s got the low-down on quantity surveyors by the handful in Mowlem’s south east region who have switched to O’Rourke. He makes me a list of names…then I manage to lose it in the salad bowl at the hotel in Aalst. Drat. Edward Scissorhands will kill me if he gets to know.
Back in the office for a little latest madness? Hey, I’m sporting black trousers from Scania along with a black t-shirt and black shoes. "Very Ninja" says Bob Marley. Hold on, Bob…is that an insult or a compliment. I’m worried that it might be the latter. Ninja what? Turtles?
I’ve never had trousers before with pockets where you’re not supposed to have pockets, like great flappy items running down to your knee. Suddenly I see what they’re for... they’re for transporting bats.
So I’m going to wear them in France, especially at Alpe d’Huez after this sponsored ride. You need to be warned of the horse flies if you leave that place by way of the Col de Sarenne and the open moorland out there. I got eaten alive that day…and Annett got away scott-free. I’m going back armed with bats to wreak my revenge.
This office is up on the 10th floor and outside, the helicopter tourists are back… packed with middle-aged Japanese ladies.
They always can tell when it’s the rutting season and Julius, he with Debrett’s-syndrome, is doing his daily strip-to-the-waist routine, both before and after work. They throw things across to him. Scraps or paper with their phone numbers. I’m envious. I wish I was a Sex God.
The Trumpeter now wishes he wasn’t. He’s finding that having two women is one too many…especially when the first is, or was, a Serbian sniper. Only today she commutes to Monument by tube, crosses the cobbles and does IT configurations for a money-comes-easy web-site. Hana got excited at him having a number two and that’s when the Trumpeter’s bedroom light bulb went pop. Twice. Both at a bad time. From the house opposite. He’s thinking of leaving and starting a new life, breeding Percherons in Belgium.

La Touissuire....a big climb for a first-timer

2006-04-11T08:34:00.000-07:00

In all its years, the Tour de France has never been to the ski station of La Toussuire…and I’ve never cycled up the climb to La Toussuire.
So what better reason for us all to go there.
We’re talking about the finish line on stage 16 of this year’s Tour de France and come the day, they’ll be beaming live pictures of it on Eurosport for around seven hours. Don’t miss it. Wednesday July 19.
It’s also the stage I’m doing for my Tour de Force exploit. I’ll be in action there on the self-same route on Tuesday July 4 though I don’t expect to see my name painted in the road or crowds or cameras or anything like that.
Stage 16 is staggering. It’s a classic hard day in the Alps when the road is either going up or coming down.
The route starts off in Bourg d’Oisans and after 2km it starts going uphill like there’s no tomorrow. The road climbs relentlessly… for 43km. Up and up for hours on end and only then are you at the top, sitting on the Col du Galibier.
It stands at 2645m. There’s no vegetation….just bare rocks and scree. You can see why - the surface is covered in snow for all but the briefest part of the year.
But this is the start, not the finish. The Galibier is only the first of the day’s big climbs.
But it is, or should I say it will be, the highest point that the riders reach in the entire three-week event and the views are fabulous.
At 3km from the top there is a tunnel straight through to the other side and therein lies temptation. Cars use the tunnel, especially when snow lies on the upper slopes. Cyclists, by contrast, tend to ignore it. I mean, when you’ve come this far, you want to do the real thing. That’s what it’s all about. If I wanted stick myself in a tunnel I’d go to Rotherhithe and ride under the Thames.
After plunging down the far side, sweeping round the bend on the upper slopes and blistering over the torrent at Plan Lachat, there’s a glimpse of civilisation at Valloire, a ski station.
Next comes the Col de Telegraphe, more of a blip really as we’re basically still on the way down.
A short stretch of valley, riding next to a river, should bring a little relief before the next monster, the climb up the Col de la Croix de Fer. This is the one I’m most looking forward to.
The Croix de Fer is beautiful. It tops out at 2067m.
But the end is still nowhere in sight as beyond that there’s the Col du Mollard to pedal up. It runs to 1638m.
Only then does the route dive back to the valley bottom fishing before the final climb to La Toussuire kicks in. I’m full of hopes of getting there before crashing into bed. La Toussuire stands at a height of 1690m.
I need to ask someone at the Tour de France how much climbing there is in total that day. The Press Office must know. The French call it dénivelée. I call it evil punishment.
When I signed up to the Tour de Force, my aspiration was to do the whole thing. The entire three weeks. Yes, every day. In the past two months I’ve been lifting the volume of my training and have hit a snag. Backache. It’s remorseless…and frustrating. It’s like the burden/effect of the last training ride isn’t out of the system before the loading starts up again.
My physio has done his best, but the message is that the back isn’t up to it. Hence the revised plan. Even the new proposal comes with quite a challenge...it’s not so much the distance of 182km that day but the volume of climbing.
Bernard Hinault, otherwise known as The Badger, is a five-times past winner of the Tour de France. He now officiates on the podium in a green blazer, moving the young stars about in the correct order, shuffling and shunting, making sure they shake hands with the right dignitaries, always giving the camera shots a certain gravitas.
He says that Stage 16 from Bourg d’Oisans to La Toussuire is "a stage for champions" and I have to agree.
What with the Col du Galibier and the string of further climbs before the first-time-ever ascension to La Touissuire, Hinault says: "It’s going to be crazy, one of the courses that could add to the making of a legend."
You want a little more from Hinault? Find this to be tasty stuff?
Well, here goes. It sets the scene. "Because each year the Tour is decided in these great mountain passes, because each year in ever higher numbers, the public gather on the slopes of great passes to guess who will be on the highest podium when the Tour is over.
"And to imagine that it could all be decided on the ascent to La Toussuire, on a route that the contestants have never ridden before as part of a race…the event of July 19 2006 could be really explosive."
I’d like to add to that…and say that it could prove equally explosive on Tuesday 4 July.
Eurosport might not be there to cover that day but I’ll blog you an update once my bike is at rest…no promises over doing that right away….if it’s the next morning you’ll know I simply collapsed at the keyboard. A podium place for power napping. If only there was an award for that.
* Finally: many thanks to my sponsors who have backed this change to plan. Some told me that they continue to be driven in their desire to show support for the charity…. and a couple have added the comment "please keep up the blog…we love it".

Tour of Flanders....all shaken and stirred

2006-04-07T02:22:00.000-07:00

For the millions of cycle racing fans who tuned in to the action last weekend, the highlight of Tour of Flanders was the tremendous head-to-head battle between two world-class riders, Tom Boonen and Lief Hoste, as they went at it, full on, over the final three cobbled climbs.

Hoste attacked on the Valkenberg climb and only Boonen went with him. They were locked together throughout the final 34km. Pure magic for the viewers.

But for a different bunch of individuals, numbering 15,000 in all, the day before was the highlight of the weekend. Out there in action themselves, they got the green light to cover the self-same twists and turns as Boonen and Hoste..

And I was one. Aged 60, but still a first-timer and nervous.

The route includes 16 steep climbs, known as muurs, each with its own variant name. Over the year’s the resonance of their titles had made a certain impact…. the Oude Kwaremont, the Eikenberg and the Berendries to name but three.

The hard hills I expected. But what came as a total surprise, while pushing round our 160km circuit, pink symbols along the way, and all of it scattered amongst the rolling farmland to the east of Oudenaarde, was the volume of cobbles on the flat. The most irksome came at Mater-Kerkgate as it was the longest, 3km in all. I had bubble-wrap protection round my handle bars. I started eating into my protection.

Mind you, some downhill cobbled stretches were also a worry, though of a different sort. You see, we did some of the event in rain….and wet cobbles and wet manhole covers and corners at the bottom of descents leading onto level crossings made descending a fun occupation.

The cobbled climbs then. They were a lottery. The most awesome was the Muur-Kapelmuur in that it hits a gradient of 22%. Otherwise known as the Muur van Geraardsbergen. But there was cement between the cobbles here, and we had a crowd to cheer us on. So I loved that one.

To my mind, the worst was the Bosberg because the ratio of cobble to void/space/nothing-between-cobble was particularly poor. Safe surface accounted for 60% of surface area, at best. The gaps…they were twice as wide as my road bike’s tyre.

However Tom Boonen, bless his socks, thought the Koppenberg was the worst. “It is an extreme hill because there are no cobblestones on it…not on the last part, there they just threw a few rocks together,” said Boonon after the race. “If someone falls between them, you’ll never see that person again.” So you’re taking this in, hey? Listen, this is the current world champion talking.

But back to Saturday. Our team of nine emerged from the Start Zone arch at 9.45am. As multitudes of earlier-birds had been pushing off ever since 8am, we had a great mix of speeds, of ever-changing groupings throughout the day. I kept seeing others of the nine here and there, but was mostly riding at my own speed.

The big question when I got back was ‘did you ride the Koppenburg?’ and the answer was no I didn’t. It was totally blocked by riders walking/pushing. In fact I’d never have got up that one anyway as the earlier rain had left its mark….it had triggered a surface-smear, a coating of greasy mud and my tyre slipped at every pedal push. No bite.

At home, seven of our little group ride all as Bayeaux Landscapes. So they are ridiculously macho….even the 10mile ride from the hotel in Aalst to the start-proper in Ninove was a burn-up! I got left behind.

But other faces popped up from time to time during the day. There was Andy Lake and others clad in recognisable Kingston Pheonix clothing. Sponsored by Cluttons. Then a pair of Brighton Mitre guys, sponsored by no-one…one had even been on one of my coaching sessions in the past. He was too strong on hills.

At the mid-point, I worried that I might not actually see one fat slug fall off. But suddenly I did. On a climb, just one rider ahead. Off to the left. Flat on the deck. Such lovely clean bright clothing as well. No warning.

Up ahead, it seems that Uncle Festa also took a tumble. You know, I’m supposed to be his lead-out man in races back at home. He was behind Mr Cool Fashion. That’s John, painter and decorator by trade. The rider in front of Mr Cool braked, so John did as well, and Festa…. well he fell off.

That was only the start of his trouble as he couldn’t get his foot out of the pedal. It just wouldn’t budge. Something drastic was needed.

Sean is Mr Drastic. He was a car mechanic. Now a lecturer in the evil art. Still nifty with a blow-torch is Sean. And with a reputation.

It seems that when in spot-welding mode, he is inclined to put the blue flame through any assistant’s hand. So with Sean heading for some tackle in the nearby farm-yard, Festa got visions of his foot gone missing, never mind his pedal. Trigger the miraculous cure.

But our man had already had – and continued to have – a battering back at the hotel. See, every time Festa stood up from the table he would clatter his bonce into the heavy glass lampshade, shaped at a cutting angle. And also he’d walk into the brute which is even worse. I think that glass eye of his needs a warranty check.

Anyway Festa was on form and later in the race, at the next stop, he collared some hapless official for a hosepipe. That’s the kind of English word every Flemish guy would know. Yes? Anyway, there was a shrugging of shoulders. Well, how about some WD30 then, Festa asks. Mmm, good to know that Mr Bonce shops at Poundstretcher.

The VW Campervan report is what you’d expect. Two arrests, well stops on suspicion. The first when parked up in a roadside aire on the way home, for a quiet brew up. A coffee call. The siren is on and the three-up gendarmerie splatter me-boy against the side and go into full search mode.

Then twice. Me-boy is rolling through customs in Calais. Here’s the finger pointing the Camper to the side. Here’s the gallery of goons pilling into the contents. What no hash, no illegals, no counterfeit dubloons.

We, you should know, were happiness itself on our ferry back. No car alongside me, just a space. Come the time to return and reload and there’s a guy stood in the space and he’s swinging a string of sausages. Uncooked ones at that. Swirling them round and round.

Then up comes another guy and grabs the loose end and the turn it into a skipping rope. At which point you might be expecting me to say Julie Andrews appeared, or a bottle of Bovril. But no. You would be wrong.

Just two 60-year-old idiots. I sometimes think I must be the only sane guy around.

PS Not much room for the low-down on the office trickery but Buttons has a problem with goats. She keeps three in her loft. This is Putney. Not only are they smelling to high heaven, but the disappearance of the camellia and various other shrubs in the ground-floor flat’s garden area is arousing suspicions. The neighbour is in alarm mode and cctv is on walls and pols. A new source must be found. Buttons is being nice Appollo Creed. His mother has plants.

Nick is getting nervous. He’s instructed me not to say anything about him so I won’t.

Tour of Flanders.....with a slug warning

2006-03-30T02:20:00.000-08:00

Excitement rules. A package has arrived and I’ve hamfistedly spilled a multitude of small bits over the carpet and have realised that I’m formally entered in the Tour of Flanders.

Excellent. It seems that I’m rider 1351 and I have a big red number to stick on to prove it.

I also have a Controlekaart for the Ronde Van Vlaanderen voor Wielertouristen en Mountainbikers. The last word of that little lot is decipherable at least. I have a phone number for the lichhamelijke schade (but I’m hoping they speak French if I need help) and I have a tear-off credit for a free bandenlichters which is available at….the T-shirt stand. No wonder French nationalists despair.

Mountainbikers get to ride their own circuit around Ninove, based on road markers in yellow paint…while the plan for us “touring cyclists” is to twist and turn over 160km according to the demands of the pink paint road markings.

I won’t bore you with details of the 15 climbs that lie ahead, but the first comes at 30km.

It’s the Molenberg. Length: 325m. Max gradient: 9.8%. Well at home, I come up Pebble Hill and that’s really steep. It’s 17%.

But hold on, there’s a few shocks here. The brutes are bigger/tougher than I thought….like the Paterberg rears up at 20% and the Koppenberg comes with a 22% warning. Steep yes, but at least they are short.

Only next to the end, so climb 14, and we get the Muur-Kapelmuur which weighs in with both a maximum steepness (20%) and a length of 1000m. That’s 1km….no wonder I’ve been advised to ride with a granny ring because when frite-flavoured, beer-bulked local guys keel over it’s like having like fat slugs on a path and you need to be nippy and twiddly so you can dive round them.

So roll on ferry time and two blissful nights in Aalst. None of our group of 10 have ever done it before. One VW Camper is now staying at home, presumably breeding duties call. But the northern VW Camper will be there, parked on some unsuspecting soul’s front lawn no doubt. Moray, the driver, is coming from down from Macclesfield and he has booked a 2am ferry crossing from Dover. Madman. Fancy being both cold and sleepless and seasick all at once.

What news do I have. Dougie, another ex-Huddersfield racing type, wants to meet up. We both have been hired as lead-out riders by Jim Gowan, king sprinter by appointment to Bayeaux Tapestries, or is it Batteries, or Nurseries, or Natteries. Anyway, Jim has a place in the sun in the Canaries where he slopes off to train, so we’re being nice to him. I have no sun tan.

And at work, Erroll claims to have seen David Icke. One of these dodgy sheds he bought on eBay was being delivered and the driver had just started to unload when behold, there was a divine intervention. Icke himself rushed forward as if on a mission, chased by a line of 12ft lizards towards the mansion of a certain Mr Burnett. Yes, he of Ashtead fame. He’s a neighbour.

Mr Sorehead has left us with several tins of Spam in the office fridge. We’re posting it out to Hong Kong. That’s where his new job is. We want him to become Mr Happy. If it goes second class it should arrive nice and green.

Twinkle-eye has a twinkle in his eye. No wonder. He’d pulled the disappearing bus stop trick again. This was Sunday morning. The mother-in-law comes by bus for the day. The whole day. The first bus delivers her to Chelmsford bus station where she waits for a number 710 and gets on. She asks for the first stop after the White Horse. Twinkle-eye lives right next to it.

Only if he zapps out at dawn, unscrews the sign, then the bus stops one stop further on, outside Number 85 which also has a yellow gate. The mother-in-law is happy to sit and chat all day to somebody else. What do they talk about? Mostly its about the upsurge of 12ft lizards.

Arthur McBride in Smock Alley

2006-03-24T06:32:00.000-08:00

The justification for this new post is that I’ve just emerged from a monstrous hike in the number of my hours spend in the saddle…in the space of four days I’ve been pedalling for 17 hours.

We live in Surrey, close to where the River Mole cuts through the North Downs at Box Hill.

The plan was to ride down to the coast on Saturday and then again on Sunday, the target being Lancing, attacked both from the east and from the west. Two back-to-back rides. That could be cue saddle sores or back ache or cold hands….given the howling wind out of the north east.

And building on all that, Tuesday afternoon’s plan was to discover a bit of new world. I’d past signs for Smock Alley the last time out and as I’m a sucker for fascinating names, Smock Alley was big on fascination.

It was for a similar reason that I recently put Itchingfield on my weekly agenda. It brought visions of the hordes rolling on their backs, like horses do in sunshine. Then running home with teasels, still teasel-broddling into zones unknown located well down their backs.

For days, I’ve been pre-occupied by a tune. It just won’t come right. I’m well on the first line - I had a first cousin called Arthur McBride- but then I go dim. I bet Dave Burleigh would know.

Saturday’s ride started none too well….one hour into a five-hour ride and I discovered that I’d no drink bottle. When you’re gone 60 you can be excused these things but it doesn’t help. No food either, but then that’s normal.

In two hours I’m in Steyning, sitting on the pavement with a pint of milk and a Mars bar. Proper milk. Blue top. I think of Nicole Cooke’s mother as she’s a big fan of milk by all reports and she has a world champion on her hands in the marvellous Nicole.

I’m off up and over Steyning Bowl. “You’ll need a bazooka, mate,” a guy says, pointing the way up and over the Downs. He was right. I’m hoping the Tour de Force comes supplied with bazookas.

Sunday dawns, I’m stiff as hell, but there’s no rain so I’m off for Ditchling Beacon. Other cyclists drool over Ditchling but I’m not sure. There are always too many cars, some too close behind and for some reason they always seem to rev ridiculously on this climb.

But there’s always an ice-cream seller on the top and despite a howling wind for the second day running, I shell out £1.50 for a king-sized, you-watch-I-squirt 99 cornet and quickly get tucking in. Normally, I pretend that I only have a pound coin and enjoy a haggle over whether or not I can get a chocolate flake thrown in for free.

And so on the seafront again for the second time. Pebbles rolling under waves. It reminds me of days at Shingle Street. Suddenly I remember parts of the second line to the Arthur McBride song. I bet Dave (the king of Northumbrian pipe making) Burleigh knew all the time. I wonder if he’s fortified his anti-heron defences since we last met. What, not enough fish for them in the river Coquet?

It’s always nice to get back to work and hear what the odd-balls (hey, I’m normal) have been up to. What do I find this time round??

Edward Scissorshands has been trying to speed-date Puffy (that might be Buffy – all I get to see is the gallery of photos on his desk – I bet Dave Burleigh has NO idea who she is).

Erroll has been in the garden. He’s a mountain-biker. Nominally anyway. He buys all these bargains on eBay. They need fixing. So he buys sheds on eBay to fix bikes in. Cheap sheds with parts that don’t fit together. Then he comes to work, looks back at eBay again…and sees more cheapo bikes to sell.

And Julius. He with Debrett’s-syndrome. He’s built a tugboat in his back garden and despite this being in the middle of Kent, pulls it to the coastline with a Percheron . Well he did until the horse ran off to Belgium.

Countdown to the Tour of Flanders

2006-03-17T04:21:00.000-08:00

Total raised £9,500

For the additional £300 added to the pot since the last post, I am indebted to Pearce Construction.

I already link them to cycling as I managed to visit the Newport Velodrome when it was part-complete and I got back on the opening night which was highly memorable as it was heaving with world names in track cycling.

I can now add that as a user of the velodrome's indoor boarded track in November and December, it is a splendid facility....on a winter's day it is such a delight to be inside in the warm.

Tour of Flanders

But now back out into the cold...and to thoughts of the next big challenge, another step in the preparation for the Tour de Force.

Flanders-and-all-that will be on Saturday 1 April and it's when 15,000 enthusiastic nutters take part in a cyclosportif which follows the same route as the professional riders who are out there on the same climbs the following day.

This year I will be one of the nutters. It's my first time, so I don't know what to expect.
We're a group of 10 heading over there in three cars, staying two nights in nearby Aalst.

You have three circuits to pick from: 250km, 160km or 90km.

The beauty of the middle one is that it both starts and finishes in the same place, Ninove. So no problems in getting to Brugge, where the 250km kicks off, and finishing miles away. Also the first 90km of the big circuit is flat and typically it is into a headwind, either when heading out to the coast at Ostende or on the way back.

So what to we get for our 160km? Well.... all the famous climbs, every single one of the 16 little horrors, most of them with cobbles.

The hotel is holding 11 beds but we've had one cancellation...I'm thinking it might be just the thing for Accord's Adam Shutkever. Come on sir, pack up that bike. Think of it as your stretch target.

To stop thinking you're balmy you always look for someone doing something worse so you can, by comparison, perceive yourself as normal. True?

So... I should add that two additional riders to the ones mentioned will be coming out separately, each driving-crossing-driving in their own 300-year-old VW Camper and each sleeping in their own VW Camper.

Defies logic? No, I'd best not say that as one of the two is Paul Howard. He sat opposite me here at work for a year or two when he was on Plant Managers Journal. Now he's a full-time breeding machine, oops I mean freelance. But his family is set to double to four. Anyway he quit working here, rode the Tour of France circuit two years ago and wrote a book "Riding High". I need to read it...I nearly started (honest Paul) but got side-tracked into another book which centred on the breeding exploits of Jaques Anquetil, five times winner of the Tour around 30 years ago. Wonderfully scurrilous.

Sunshine corner

Most of the days of the Tour de Force this June-July will be 220km-240km which is awesome. Like daunting, day after day.

So I've had a dive into the history of the Tour and in those early days riders were doing really long stages, like 460km and 470km.

Mmm....I think I'd have been sneaking myself into a passing VW Camper whenever no-one was looking.

So hi, Paul. This is John here....any chance you might just be on the Col de Tourmalet when I need you? You and the rust bucket....oops, I mean that delightful collector's item, I mean vintage treasure, I mean.....

Update - taking shape at the start of March

2006-03-03T03:46:00.000-08:00

Total raised £9,200

The back page article in Contract Journal triggered two more donations, lifting the total to date from £,9000 to £9,200. One of the two donors urged me to think about doing an event in California called the Deathride. Mmm.

And no, in case you're thinking it, he doesn't work for O'Rourke.

Meeting the group

I found myself hiving along the pavements along the Kings Road on Tuesday evening. It was freezing cold outside but all the shop doors all wide open even at 6.45pm. I say doors but in most cases there seemed to be an absence of doors....just a shop-front that was either glass or non-glass....like a hole.
And no end of glossy items to sell. A pair of long, pointed, light brown shoes caught my eye. Would they be leather or cobra skin? Would they take pedal cleats? Doubtful.
Then into the Coopers Arms. So where was the upstairs room we have booked? Two guys ahead opened and then shut three pantry doors and I guessed that they were on the same mission as me.
They were. Some happy guide sent us round a back route, a mere 14-inch gap between two walls and up we went.
Wates, the construction company from Leatherhead, is at the basic heart of this Tour de Force enterprise/project/madness and in just a few minutes marketing director Jonny Wates will get the formal part into motion.
And here's Joe Mearns. He's important. Like totally.... as his Greenrock outfit are in charge of keeping us on the move from start to finish, a sort of subcontract from Wates. Joe and I get a good natter and everything puts me more at ease.
I'm fighting against any more red wine but these trays of sausages are something that can't be resisted (they are chunky and first rate, Dave Burleigh if you're wondering)
There's a list on the wall, a sort of flow-chart that you'd expect when a construction firm is
doing the planning.
Do I know any names?
I see that six names (mine is one) have a red line running from start to finish. It looks awesome. Do I really know what I'm doing? Everything from the start in Strasbourgh all round the country in an anti-clockwise direction and finally back to Paris?
Three of the other " reds" are in the room. I manage a word with Diane (it seems it was her original idea) and Laura (who seems to have been on a mad camping holiday in Afghanistan).
James is to be singled out for a word but he slips the net.
He's gone. I'm gone.
More later.
John.