The Big Off, it's the Tour de France...in England

If you want something done right, do it in Britain.

No matter what your event, it goes better in Britain.  The best Olympics ever?  London.  Best city for a marathon?  London.  Greatest arts festival in the world?  Edinburgh. 

But if you want something done exceptionally do it in Yorkshire.

This is a country with special qualities.  Yorkshire is often described as ‘God’s own country’, especially by Yorkshiremen.

Yorkshiremen are without doubt the lovliest people in the world, who can greet you with a cheery ‘ow do?’ with equal enthusiasm and with their flat cap equally horizontal in sun, sleet, snow or rain…when they are in Yorkshire.

The moment they step outside the County, you truly understand why they refer to it as God’s own country; to hear them endlessly bang on about it you’d think it was the Garden of Eden as they bring a missionary zeal to describing just how bloody great Yorkshire is.  Tirelessly.

So, best stage of the Tour de France ever?  Yorkshire.  Naturally.

It would appear that the simple solution to securing the success of any sporting spectacle is simple; hold it in Britain.

Especially cycling.  And no wonder.  This is a country that loves cycling.  When you’re a lid cycling means freedom, when you’re an adult cycling means being able to purchase loads of cool gear and nod meaningfully when people talk about carbon fibre.  And no wonder we produce such talent.  Every kid with a bike has the capacity to become a world champion.  And plenty of them have a training regime from an early age, up at an early hour summer and winder, putting in the miles.  They’d go even faster if they didn’t have to stop every few yeards and put newspapers through people’s doors.

But it’s not just children.  The sight of men in lycra thundering along Britain’s roads is not at all an unusual one.  Or a pretty one.  The sight of athletes, who actually look good in lycra, thundering along Britain’s roads, is a little rarer.  And a lot prettier, if you like thighs.

Usually the sort of chap to be seen of a weekend, top to toe cycling gear, looks like he is racing towards a pub or pie shop rather than a yellow jersey and a drugs test.  Middle aged, but like many middle-aged men not old enough to know better, men who wander into cycle shops appear to suffer from the same condition that grips the type of man who purchases an insanely powerful motor cycle, or lots of Lego.  They are trying to recapture their youth, which is something of a challenge no matter how hard one peddles.

The Tour de France traditionally starts with a stage called ‘The Big Off’, which takes place outside France.  Usually this takes place in a country so near France that it is indistinguishable from France, like Belgium, which is either a country or a beer and mussels theme park, I’ve never been sure.

In truth, the nation is right to be excited about hosting the Big Off.  It’s actually right to be over-excited about hosting the Big Off.  This is a big deal.

Because the Tour de France is impressive, the race footage tends to be swooping helicopter shots of idyllic villages, castles and monasteries.  It should really be accompanied by a swirling, stirring orchestral score and a telephone number at the bottom of the screen to ring to get your brochure.

The excitement has been building for some time now, developing into expectation.  This is drama, this is excitement, speed, colour, swooshing along roads, flinging water bottles left and right, the crowds loving it and, of course, the names of the villages being rendered in French on the BBC, something that will especially cheer a certain class of claret-coloured illiberal xenophobe and possibly stimulate UKIP membership.

This is the greatest Big Off ever because it’s taking place in a country that loves cycling, is used to putting up with road closures, is enthusiastic to the point of mania when it comes to cheering and is taking place in a country so beautiful one might be mistaken for thinking some of it is CGI for a fantasy film.

Re:cycling

Bikes.  Lycra.  Olympics.

This has been a spectacular summer for cycling.  Not actually cycling, of course, it’s been bloody miserable weather and unless your cycle came equipped with those pontoon things that they fit to helicopters to allow them to land on water and get attacked by sharks, it’s unlikely you will have enjoyed cycling this summer.  Certainly, I get out on my bike now and again, usually when I want to make a short hop and am both to lazy to walk it and far too tight to bother paying for parking at the other end and certainly again, this year, I began to question being too tight to pay for the optional rear mudguard on my bike, as the spray from the rain thrown up by my rear wheel somehow managed to both hit the nape of my neck and soak my arse.

The spectacular cycling was mainly happening in the velodrome of the Olympic Park and in the streets around Hampton Court, where Team GB showed two things; that if you are one of the greatest cyclists in the world at the peak of your form, you are likely to be looking at the arse of the member of Team GB in front of you and thinking very dark thoughts indeed, and that if you wear lycra, you need to have the body of an Olympian underneath it.

Cycling is, apparently, the new golf.  This, I think, means that middle-aged men have something to get them out of the house at the weekend for a few hours and also something to spend vast sums of money on in order to have a better time doing it.  I have no idea where carbon fibre comes from but I do know that bikes made out of it are very expensive and, presumably, whoever owns a carbon fibre mine spends most of their evenings rolling around in cash, hookers and coke.

The worrying words in the paragraph above are ‘middle-aged’.  In isolation, not a cause for concern.  Let me throw in another word.  Lycra.

I know, I know, we all thought that the practice of wearing lycra as a surface layer finished in the eighties, at the conclusion of which it was tossed in the huge cultural skip along with ra-ra skirts and rolling up the sleeves on your jacket.  Apparently not so.  Middle aged men are wearing lycra to cycle.  The result…have you ever seen sausage meat being squeezed into its skin?  No?  Lucky you.

Because the reality is if you want to be a champion cyclist, you have to be superhuman.  This is why the only people who should appear in public wearing lycra are those with super-powers, or the sort of people who have got up at four in the morning every year since they were eight and spent all day practicing pedalling.  By which I mean Olympians.

Because to be a champion you need an unhealthy degree of obsession.  You may think all you need is enough steroids to make a racehorse break the sound barrier and more blood bags than a vampire banquet, but not so.  You also need a bike so advanced it makes a Formula 1 car look like something that clowns pile out of in the Big Top.

Middle aged men will proudly show you their carbon fibre bikes so light that they can pick up with one finger, after they have unscrewed the GPS system, the water bottles, the on-board defibrillator and so on.  This is a far cry from the bicycles of my youth that gave so much joy, machines that appeared to be made out of scaffold poles welded together and were practically indestructible, or at least child-proof, which is practically the same thing.  These same hearty beasts of burden in grown up form propelled district nurses around and were often to be seen with bags of groceries suspended from both handlebars as stately matrons returned from the shops.

The Olympics came to London to inspire a generation.  They did.  In this case, it’s the generation of blokes over forty who walked past the Harley showroom and straight into Action Bikes for some serious kit and some very tight pants.

Bikes today are so light they have to be tethered to railings to stop them floating away.

http://www.guardian.co.uk/environment/2009/apr/23/tricycle-christiania-trikes-eco-transport

After the frustrations of the weekly commute, travel by bicycle at the weekend is a real tonic, be it bunny-hopping from bonnet to bonnet of trapped cars in a traffic jam with a cheeky wave; using your pump, specially lead-weighted for the purpose, to swipe at the passing wing-mirror of a car that has nearly forced you off the road - or the simple joy of negotiating a crowded pavement at high speed to avoid riding in traffic.

While happy to spend a reasonable amount modifying my bicycle (plastic bottle containing drink can be obtained for less than a quid in most supermarkets, so I suppose that having to stump up three quid for an empty plastic bottle has to be justified by the bike shop describing it as an ‘in-motion hydration system’), I do find that most trikes are ruinously expensive for what you get. How can the addition of an extra wheel result in adding an extra zero to the price tag?

There are obvious drawbacks to riding a trike. All of the usual hazards of the road are there (such as the idiot youth who has decided to finance the ‘mods’ to his Clio by selling off any sort of intelligence to the highest bidder in what I can only assume is some fort of ‘common-sense offset’ scheme*) but there are other hazards too, such as people diving out in front of you and attempting to buy an ice cream from you. Trikes are uncommon and there’s nothing like a trio of tyre-tracks across the startled face of a wailing toddler to bring trouble, and the rozzers, to your door.

The selling point of this trike is the ability, apparently, to take your children with you. Fantastic, this means that instead of the sullen little sods refusing to come out on a family bike-ride, they can sulk in comfort in the front basket, texting their friends and probably social services about this abuse.

How long, indeed, before those with ‘pimp-my-ride’ ambitions but a ‘pimp-my-bike’ budget latch onto this. When I were a laddo, the ultimate bike mod was a playing card through the spokes. This made a satisfying ‘brrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrr’ noise. With all that space in the front, might not some anti-social git decide it’s just big enough to fit in a sub-woofer that sets off earthquake warnings.

The bicycle is about freedom, not about being tied down – that’s why you are discouraged from attaching bikes to so many railings. More than one person on a bike? That’s what a tandem is for (that and for testing relationships to destruction, oh - ‘is she actually bloody peddling back there’ - you bitter, bitter thought). Or giving your mate a backie (which come to think of it sounds like a deviant practice). Two wheels are good, the world is your playground (well, the solid bits are). Three wheels and a kid in the front? Sounds like responsibility, not fun.

* This is an offshoot of the ‘rage offset’ scheme, already in use in many walks of life and especially in the media. Some issues cause far too much rage for one person to safely handle. So, the journalist writes an article about, say, foreign people and that rage is offset by literally dozens of people who read the Daily Mail.

Fit for nothing

I’m writing this in the grip of a hangover so vile that I am seriously considering retaining the services of an exorcist to shift it. It’s not just the headache, although that’s bad enough, it’s the way that, these days, a hangover seems to affect my entire body, it’s like having the flu, indeed it’s so much like having the flu that I crave lemsip and am starting to think that I might actually have the flu, a stealth flu that is concealing itself behind my hangover.

It’s not just the body that feels like one big clogged sinus, it’s the psyche too. Oh, there’s the shame and regret naturally, not exactly on a par with being discovered wanking through the letterbox of the girl you have a crush on, but niggling, nonetheless.

Indeed, I feel I may actually have strayed into the realm of the exo-hangover, a hangover so bad that I actually need to externalise its properties. This would certainly seem to be the case judging from my last visit to the loo. I’m no feaceologist but I’m pretty sure that water is not supposed to react like that when poo hits it.

All in all, I’d quite like to stick a hose in my mouth and turn on the water until every orifice, pore and organ is sluiced clean from within, turning me into some sort of ornamental fountain of virtue. But as that sort of treatment is only available to suspected terrorists, I’ll have to settle for paracetamol and coffee.

Exercise is supposed to be good for a hangover. Possibly this is a reverse of the stealth flu syndrome, where you start exercising and, at some point, your hangover symptoms cannot compare with the discomfort you are feeling as a result of your strenuous activity and leaves in a pouty huff. Apparently if you exercise for long enough, your body releases dolphins or something and you get a ‘natural high’. This is surely tosh; if it were true then pubs would have treadmills instead of alcohol.

Then again, it might explain why people who go to the gym always look so smug, at least the ones who can last for longer than 30 minutes on the treadmill without throwing up.

It might also explain why I was in such a ridiculously good mood at the conclusion of my bike ride this weekend. My pedalling was not a result of a virtuous desire for exercise but rather a need to go to the shops to buy sausage and the car being elsewhere at the time. It’s uphill all the way to the next village and by the time I got there I was cursing Chris Hoy and Victoria Pendleton for making it look so easy.

The trip back though was fantastic, downhill all the way, over pavements strewn with fallen autumn leaves, it was like gliding through a carpet gold, all the while singing along with George Thurgood ‘One burbon, one scotch, one beer’ and punctuating it with the occasional ‘wheeeeeeeeeee’ of joy for good measure.

The bike is so, so much better than jogging or being a member of a gym. This is because as a bloke it fulfils all your accessorise requirements, you can strap loads of stuff to it, even stuff that doesn’t need batteries. It also fulfils a bloke’s wanderlust requirements: see an interesting side trail, then down it you go. Okay, there’s a danger that you might unexpectedly ride out into mid-air before having an impromptu industrial heritage experience or, as it’s otherwise known, a dip in a canal and there’s always the danger of coming face to horn with a bull, but overall the advantages outweigh the disadvantages.

The drawback is trying to convince others that the time you have spent essentially finding a new way to get mud up your back entitles you to tell them about it. People who stopped cycling as soon as they started driving are unlikely to be impressed by tales of off-road daring-do, even when you show them the broken branches sticking to your helmet and the blood and matted animal fur stuck to the pump you used to defend yourself.

Life (and death) in the fast lane

Travel in the modern world is, with a few exceptions, a pretty dreadful experience. Away from magazines whose pages have a glossy petrochemical sheen that makes you doubt their recyclability (unless its into other glossy magazines) and who link travel with first class air tickets or expensive cars, your average journey is usually just the dull bit between setting out and getting there.

Even the most luxurious modes of travel try hard to convince you that you are not actually travelling. Seats on aeroplanes now fold into beds to fool you that you are in a very small dorm room and allow you to studiously ignore the couple having sex in the next bunk, while cruise liners do their very best to pretend they are not ships at all but merely hotels with hulls. Why else would a ship have a pool? You’re in the ocean! The ‘this way to swimming’ signs should be pointing over the side.

Even if you’ve got an incredibly posh car, it’s unlikely that you’ve got a private motorway and so you are likely, at some point, to be stuck in roadworks, counting cones and watching the family in the car in front squabble. Luxury cars are not designed to make driving a pleasure, they are designed to make driving that bit more bearable.

The only way to really enjoy travelling is to be on a boating holiday where the whole objective is to get from A to B as slowly as possible, punctuated by many visits to waterside pubs, or get a push bike. The bicycle is the best travelling device ever - something that allows you to move swiftly from location to location while feeling gratified that you are getting their under your own steam. It also means that, unlike car drivers, you can have a flexible attitude to the interpretation of the Highway Code with especial reference to mounting pavements, haring across green spaces and being able to go up and down stairs.

The mode of transport I’ve never been able to understand is the motorbike. The motorbike seems to combine all that is worst about a bike - exposure to the elements, lack of a glove compartment, vulnerability in traffic - with all that is crap about a car - can only go on roads, costs lots to run. As I see it, the only reasons for owning a bike are: you have a beard and need an excuse for it, you are a man over 40 and as such the only leather you are now allowed to wear is a biker outfit or a gimp mask; or you have just turned 40 period.

Bikers have always annoyed the hell out of me - either as couriers in town or, worse of all, the way in which they thread between slow or stationary traffic on motorways. Maybe there was a time when a bike could do that and not be a nuisance but today, with bikes roughly the same size as an overstuffed sofa, it means that you have to move your car to let them through.

I recently learned the secret of surviving traffic - snacks! The last time I was in a traffic jam I had a cool box stuffed with crisps, chocolate and cold drinks. 45 minutes sitting in the fast lane? No problem, just listened to some tunes on the iPod and consumed about 40,000 calories. If I had not been thus occupied and, it’s true, reduced to a dazed state by all the fat and flavourings I was getting down my throat, I would probably have been able to register annoyance at the behaviour of the occasional biker shooting left and right of me.

This then, is the most probable explanation for the murder of a biker on the M40 last weekend. A biker was shot and the whole motorway was closed for a few hours. Inconvenient for those in the traffic, very inconvenient for the biker. Police think he may have been shot as the result of a biker feud after attending a biker rally. Me, I think that the guy spent a weekend with his biker mates and, on a high and considering himself king of the road, undertook and overtook and pulled all sorts of cheeky manoeuvres on the way down the motorway until he pulled that shit on somebody with a short temper and a long barrel on their illegal firearm.

Police intend to spend the summer visiting biker rallies and will probably complete the investigation short of suspects but with plenty of new gear for the cycle cops. As a line of enquiry it’s a pretty good one, certainly better than working on who has a grudge against bikers - they can start with pretty much the entire DVLA database. Me, I’d look for the car with the sticker on the side in the shape of a silhouette of a biker’s helmet.