Talk Show Host

Yeah.

I've come to the conclusion that the Schwartz burger is the best burger in Bath. Even when you've had many pints, you can still taste them. And they still taste good. Expensive but.

Caught up with friends of the family John and Jenny this evening and It Was Good. Must have been close to 10 years, and that's always interesting to cross that gap. Then - and this was several pints later - the other John and I caught up in All Bar One, along with our semi-regular riding companion Kirsty, who was there with her rowing mates. The place has no soul and no acoustics, but it's smoke-free. Roll on July.

The weekend should be full of off-road fun, as we're going to Afan (in Welsh Wales) for some off-road fun. That's two lots of off-road fun in two days in Welsh Wales. A tip that I remembered from last time: Don't drink the coffee.

Non-random observation: I am in danger of getting fit. Next Friday: first race in six months at Castle Combe. I have my cat. 1 licence and my Chippenham Wheelers membership and I'm not afraid to use them. I think the base fitness is there, but it will take a few races before I'm back up to speed again.

Non-random observation #2: Daim bars are so good.

Yeah.

Computer says no

Les collines de la Cotswolds

Cold and grey and another 500km week. On Saturday, the plan was to go out with the Chippenham lot. I did 60km beforehand, rolled up at the cemetery at the right time, and then proceeded to adjust my brakes. It took me 20 minutes of footling around, and after 10 I told the rest of them to go. And go they did, while I semi-time trialled the whole way around the course without seeing them again. I had Killing in the name of going through my head, but it didn't help.

Oh well, it was good training.

Sunday: still cold and grey. Went north, but spent the first 20 minutes of the ride mucking about with a new saddle. Fortunately, no-one had to wait for me. I had Claire de Lune going through my head, which probably means I was tired. It doesn't really have much of a beat to it. I ended up at the Severn somewhere near Gloucester, turned around and came home. 140km all up.

I ran out of food, which was annoying, because I ate more than I normally would have. I think Saturday cooked me a bit. And I also dropped my multi-tool near the top of Bannerdown while doing about 60km/h. I didn't want to slow down so I went all the way to the flat bit near the bottom before turning around, re-climbing the hill and retrieving the vital piece of equipment.

Daylight saving started today. Maybe that's why I'm tired. A big week ahead, methinks. Time for some more Debussy preludes.

Alea iacta est

Weather remains fine, but cold.

The bearings in my left pedal nearly seized today as I was pootling along the bike path. Luckily I had some oil with me, which at least cut the awful screeching metal-on-metal noise. I think the Impacts have run their course. Now it's Time (joke) for some RXS pedals, which I schwagged from work.

I've now done six weeks of my writing course, and have learned a fair bit. We workshopped our first chapters over the last couple of weeks, and that was a nerve-wracking but very constructive experience. Everyone else is writing a serious sort of novel, so they liked my humorous and easy to read approach. We all gave each other lots of feedback, and I've got a fairly good idea of how the first chapter will go, as well as the rest of the plot and most of the characters.

Now I've just got to write the damned thing.

A few cool things I picked up from our tutor:

"When you create a sentence, you choose a particular path." When you think about it, it's amazing the power that a few written words can have.

I liked this one as well: "Aim for invisible prose. Convey the story to the reader so that they are not reading the words. They are there."

Returning to realtime blog mode...

Wednesday was fun. We went tenpin bowling with WhatMTB at some place on the outskirts of Bristol. There were eight of us all up, most of whom haven't bowled for a very long time. Except big Matt Cole, who reckoned he played three months ago. He slaughtered all of us.

We had two games of four a side, with the two plus two winners of the first game playing each other in the second, ditto for the losers. I finished last in the first game, but rallied to end up second in the losers playoff. Pete Travers, with his random but frequent strikes, was the best in our pool, followed by me, Jane and Robin. MCole won Group A ahead of Joby, Justin and Steve, I think. We retired to the bar after all that exercise.

In reverse chrono order, Tuesday was John's birthday drinks. It was a school night so we didn't have too many. But a good evening. And on Monday I went to the Raven for the Ba'ath storytelling circle. Only stayed an hour though.

Back to the present. Better do lots of road kilometres on the weekend, if I can swap over my pedals. Because next weekend I think we're going back to Afan. Now, where can I go tomorrow? The Chippenham ride is an option.

I'm working on the chess problem using a lateral approach. Something like:

White: b2 x d4
Black: d5 x d4
White: c1 - c3
Black: h5 - h6

Which is not the recommended way of doing things, but hey...

A chess problem

The problem is, I usually play black. And assuming it was my move first, I would take the white queen with my rook on h5 and be done with it. Because then if white moved their c rook to c7 - as is recommended - then white is close to checkmate. But not quite, without the queen. For what it's worth, I think black's position is lost, but there might be a chance. Problems have solutions.

You come up with these things after 320km of riding in a weekend, preceded (and interspersed) by beer. I did a 200km Audax ride on Saturday and posted something about it on the cycling plus blog. Sunday: Mendips, but only 100km. I was taking it a bit easier than last week but was still pleased with my average.

Probably no spare nights this week. Not that that's a bad thing. I also got my cat. 1 licence and my Ridley (finally) cut down to the right size. Better do some racing.

The vagabond

Before I start, I must ask the question: what the hell are Australia doing playing Scotland in the cricket? There's not really a lot of point.

Question 2: Why is Our Kylie visiting Bath? And why is she on telly now?

Today I might a genuine French vagabond by the name of Cyriac. He didn't look like one - more like a normal workman, which he was, except that he didn't have anywhere to stay. He asked me how to pronounce 'Singer' (as in the sewing machine) as I was walking up to John's Bikes at lunchtime. I told him that you don't pronounce the 'g'.

We struck up a conversation, and it was better than most I've had with strangers in the street who normally want me to sign up for charity X or switch to a new phone service. It only cost me a pound, which he used to buy a beer at Morrison's. I met him again at almost the same place on the way home from work, and learned that he bought German beer, so obviously he had half a clue about English beer.

Cyriac worked two days a week helping build temporary housing for the Glastonbury festival. He disapproved of this, because it was only a means for other people to make money. It didn't really create anything of lasting significance. He also didn't think much of Bath - the architecture because it's so uniform, the main attraction (baths) because...what's the big deal? I explained to him that the English have a funny thing about baths. He thought it was generally unfriendly and overrated.

He also didn't like France much, because everyone was so arrogant. This was coming from a Frenchman, mind you. He had a more time for the Belgians, although he described the Gentenaars as 'cold'. I've heard Gentenaars say that about themselves, so he may have a point.

That said, Cyriac wasn't bitter at all. He didn't come across as an alcoholic, either. Hell, he couldn't afford to be one here. He was articulate, intelligent and had obviously been to a lot of places in the world. I got some useful advice from him.

Postscript: My Belgian chocolates were well received at work. One box managed to make it round the office (three bike mags + website) twice.

Terrible vision

This was one of the levels on Frightmare, that classic Commodore 64 game that I never played. But for some reason, I have been trying to remember all of the different types of bad/disturbing/terrible and dream/vision/nightmare on the game. Check out this link to understand what I mean. Or even this site.

Now I'm getting all nostalgic over the dungeon of Brilhasti Ap Tarj in Bard's Tale III: Thief of Fate. What a cool game that was.

"Oh no, you groan, as you see three Undead Freds in the distance. Will your stalwart band choose to (A) Fight (B) Run?"

Back to Wales

I cannot beloive that I have now been to Wales three times since I've been in the UK. OK, so it's only an hour's drive, but it's basically a different continent. I learned that Wales is pretty much buggered because the coal mining industry became more efficient, so people have got nothing to do except work in motorway service cafes and serve the worst coffee in the world.

Yes, that is right. We stopped at the Magor road services cafe as we were driving to Afan for an MTB ride/TV shoot. I got a coffee and a large stale scroll. The coffee looked promising in that you were given a plunger full of grinds and boiling water, and you could plunge it yourself. Unfortunately, the water:coffee ratio was approaching infinity, and the result was horrible brown liquid. It could be improved by adding UHT milk and several sachets of sugar. But then it only tasted like very watery and slightly sweet UHT milk.

I couldn't finish it. That's how bad it was.

We did make it to Afan, which is a very different place to the Forest of Dean. It's typically Welsh, with towering hills and pine forests on either side of a valley, cut in half by a mountain stream. It has two great trail centres/bike shop/cafe/bike wash/other facilities, and four trails to ride, all of which are reasonably challenging. All you need is a mountain bike, and you can even hire these from the centre.

We spent several hours being filmed for a spot on SBS. During which, I got to do some fairly ridiculous bits of downhill, one bit of which I just had to walk down. And there was a raised boardwalk that I ended up walking most of. The consequences of falling off it weren't so bad, as I found out later, but I just wasn't prepared for it. Still, I kept body intact, and that was the main thing.

After an enormous lunch, we did an 18 km loop called White's Level. It basically involved a lot of climbing in the first half, and a lot of descending in the second half, including some of the bits we'd ridden previously. There was very little mud compared to FoD, but a lot of rocks which made it tricky at times. It helped that we were riding with the two trail builders, Russell and Gareth, so were in good hands.

It's pretty much all singltrack and it really carries you along. The downhills have lots of little ups that kill your momentum enough so that you can just roll over everything. I even rode most of the boardwalk the second time through. If you fall off it, you land in a bog, so it's not so bad. Again, the ridiculous things that a full suspension MTB can do are incredible compared to a road machine.

I'll hopefully get back there in a couple of weeks and do the Skyline trail, which is a 46 km loop that they reckon takes about 4 hours (you tend to stop a lot on MTB rides).

John is enjoying his fitness now. He's been riding with me three times a week and got his time up Kingsdown down from 12'30 five weeks ago to 9'02 with me pacing him last week. So he could keep up with Russ and Gareth on the uphills today, no problem, and even keep them in sight on the descent. That's no mean feat when they know the path backwards.

Weather: fairly good now, although we've had a hell of a lot of rain. It's getting up to 13 and I'm seeing a lot of blue sky. Jolly good.

Sunday postscript: I did a slightly harder version of the Mendips ride I did a couple of times with Will. 29.5 average with more than 2000m of climbing and a lot of wind. Whee!

Chocolate

Consumption on Tuesday:

1 x Twix
1 x Dark Flake
2 x mochas from the machine (OK, that's a stretch)
1 x cup of cocoa
1 x hot chocolate from Shake Away
4 x chocolate covered/chipped muesli bars
Green and Black's chocolate ice cream (most of a tub)

I think I'm missing something in my diet. The rest of it consisted of:

1 x cup of tea
1 x bowl of muesli with yoghurt and past use-by date milk
1 x drinking yoghurt
4 x muesli bars (other)
1 x triple Americano from Italian ice cream shop that serves good coffee
1 x homemade cheese and tomato baguette
1 x salmon steak with potatoes, broccoli and carrots
1/3 tub of awful cheap soft scoop vanilla ice cream (shockah!)

Wednesday: Still tired, but managed to average 28 on a hilly ride with John. Haven't finished the milk yet.

Back to Belge

Me in English cycling hooligan mode trying to steal Tom Boonen's bike. Thanks Jo for the pic!

John and I had been talking about this weekend for months, but I still couldn't believe it when we left our Friday afternoon meeting at 3pm to go to Gent. John had never been to Belgium, so why not coincide our visit with the Omloop Het Volk? The fact that we could claim it as work expenses did not influence our decision in the slightest.

Getting out of England was a pain, because everything is slow. By the time we got to the Eurotunnel, we were already half an hour behind, but as soon as we got into France, things at least ran on time. We got off at Lille Europe and walked an extremely long way in the rain to get to Lille Flandres, which should have been only 400m according to the sign. That meant we just missed the train to Gent, and didn't end up arriving until 11pm.

Reinhard - Mr Great Australian Bite - picked us up from the station and we went straight to the Marimain, via the Gouden Sate frituur. Armed with enough frites and mayonnaise to ward off Jamie's school dinners, we (re)familiarised ourselves with a number of local trappisten until approx. 2:30, Gent time. It was good to be back.

It was still raining and blowing a gale come Saturday morning, and I felt some sympathy for the riders who were doing Het Volk. I was amazed at the number of people who came out to watch the start in such appalling weather, but it's in the blood here. We bumped into Gerard and Brecht from CN too, and it was good to catch up with them again.

We didn't have a particularly busy day planned, and wandered around Gent in the rain after the start. The AGFA^® Het Lam Gods in Sint Baaf's cathedral had to be seen (we were too cheap to pay to see the real one).

Eventually we decided to go to the finish of Het Volk in Lokeren. It wasn't part of the initial plan, but our friend Els said she could drive us back to Gent at 6:30, so it was perfect. Her boyfriend lives 200m from the finish line, but they didn't take advantage of that fact and watch the end of the race. It was even sunny. Of course, it helps if you are a bike racing fan.

Work done, we headed back to the Marimain in Gent at a civilised hour, and had a few bollekes while we waited for Reiny to finish up. To everyone who wasn't there: too bad, you missed a good night! Somehow, a silly plan was hatched to visit seven cafes this evening. But Els had another engagement at 9pm, so didn't join us for the rest.

We decided we'd better eat something, and tried a pizza place called San Marino in the Vlaanderenstraat. It was busy and slow, but the pizzas weren't bad and the desserts and coffee were bloody awesome. So much chocolate, so little time. We counted this as our second cafe. Technically it isn't one, but we did have a drink there.

From there, we hit In Den Turk, Gent's oldest cafe (anno 1228). You can't really tell by looking it, but I'll believe anything I read. The menus are quite fun, too. It can best be described as a smoky jazz cafe. We asked the barman, who, like everyone is one of Reiny's regulars, what he recommended. "Beer" was the response, and I liked what I heard.

We had an idea to go to 't Galgenhuisje, Gent's smallest cafe, next, but got sidetracked on the way and ended up in Mosquito Coast. This is an interesting establishment and has a diverse mix of customers. Mostly travellers, but some locals. It's smoke-free, which suited us fine. We asked the barmaid, who wasn't a customer of Reiny's, what she recommended. "Cocktails?" was not the response we were looking for, so we enjoyed another bolleke and soaked up the ambience.

Onto 't Galgenhuisje, where they used to hang people, for our fifth cafe stop. This is quite a cool little cafe but I think we picked Gay Night to visit. The clientele were generally of the male persuasion, including one of the three women. There was a bloke dancing to Celebrate Good Times and Lady Marmalade and being eyed off by other blokes. And speaking of being eyed off, Reiny kept getting meaningful glances from a guy at the bar with a plaited pigtail and earrings dressed in leathers. Reiny explained that he wasn't a customer, but he does walk past the shop every day wearing a white leather jacket.

We only stayed for one beer and left before I started singing Electric Six's Gay Bar. Fortunately, the next cafe wasn't far away.

I've never been to the Druepelkot, because I'm a bit wary of a bar that serves jenever and very little else. The two old gents running it basically had a licence to print money; not that that's a bad thing. We went in via the back door and I thought that we'd discovered this hidden drinking hole in Gent. In fact, it fronts onto the water and is right next to the Bierhuis aan de Waterkant. Still, it is an excellent little place, comfortably fitting about 20-30.

There were mostly locals there, but also a few tourist locals like us. After fortifying ourselves with double shots of jenever, we got chatting to a number of them - a guy who had been to Australia 12 years ago and driven from Melbourne to Darwin (as you do); a couple of attractive Erasmus students from Brussels who knew The Great Australian Bite; a guy who had three triple shots of jenever in front of him and was being encouraged by the Erasmus girls to drink them all, one after the other. But he would have fallen off his chair had he done so, and the transient kudos probably wouldn't have been worth it.

Reiny gained several new customers there, and could therefore write the whole night off as 'marketing expenses'. Fortunately, we hadn't written ourselves off and we did get out of there by about 2am. Even more fortunately, the seventh and last cafe was next door, the Hot Club de Gand. Now, after our Galgenhuisje foray, we were a little nervous. We were relieved to find that this was a more ... neutral jazz cafe.

Reiny returned to the ground state (beer), John was onto the whiskey, and I decided to try jong jenever, which wasn't the best choice. It was a little raw in a methylated spirit kinda way, and I had difficulties finishing it. I opted for absinthe and a lot of water next. The green glow of the absinthe scared me, though.

We had covered a lot of ground by this stage, both physically, metaphorically and alcoholically. We'd been pacing ourselves well, and technically, we weren't actually over the limit. Much. I mean, two drinks in the first hour, one drink each hour after that, and a couple extra. Eight hours, you do the math.

The crucial thing about this equation is that the standard drink in Belgium is only 250ml, whereas in England it's a pint (about 550ml). So in the UK you have to drink a lot and very quickly, otherwise the beer gets disgustingly warm, instead of merely disgusting. This is part of the reason why the drinking culture in England (and to a lesser extent, Australia) is totally buggered.

The other reason, we theorised, is that it is very cheap to get a liquor licence in Belgium. Reiny has a licence to sell beer in his shop, but it doesn't cost him anything as long as he observes certain conditions. In Australia, it costs billions of dollars to hold a full pub licence, hence many of the drinking establishments there are large and characterless because you have to sell masses to the masses. It's so hard to find nichey places in Oz like you do in Gent, or in other bits of Europe.

This theory sounded so much better on Saturday night, but anyway...

We were fortunate enough to make the acquaintance of two more young ladies, Isabelle and Marike, who generously offered us their candle to relight our own. John had ravaged it during the course of our theorising and it needed re-igniting. I+M were students in law and medicine, but went to different universities. They were in Gent because their boyfriends were in the Ardennes for the weekend, shooting deer or something. Better the deer than us, I thought, and so we spent a rather pleasant few hours chatting to them out of range. I will not attempt to reconstruct it all here, but I did learn that jenever is pronounced like Geneva and Reiny definitely has more customers than he knows what to do with.

Sunday: Lille Europe is a masterpiece of design, yet simultaneously horrible. We had to spend two and a half hours there due to the unconnectivity of trains. Sunday night: Toy Story 2 at Lucy and Pete's.

Monday: a 190 km ride in the name of work. I even get paid extra for writing about it. How good is that?

Tuesday: tired.