Ain't life strange?

June and the first 10 days of July saw me spend just under 100 hours on my bike pedalling round France. That's proper pedalling too - panniers or hills. I got home on 13th July full of metaphorical beans - energised, energetic, tanned, rested, fit for anything.

On the 18th July I started work again, at a client site in Reading. As it happens, it's a nice office, directly above the railway station, and most of the people I've encountered so far have been good as gold. There are plenty of hotels and shops handy, so the logistics are as easy as they ever are when you're working away from home. And yet I'm knackered - exhausted, heavy-eyed, de-energised.

Admittedly I've been working hard - early mornings at the desk in my hotel room, deployment of quite a lot of brain power (or at least as much as I can muster) needed to solve a specific problem - but my knackeredness goes beyond those as explanations. It could be down to a few things. Lack of sleep is one, but I slept quite badly in the Pyrenees and didn't feel like this. Poor diet could be another, but it's not true - I've been eating really healthily. The debilitating effects of spending 11 hours a day in an air-conditioned office may come into it, but other folk seem to cope with that ok.

Nope, I reckon it's this - long periods without exercise. I have been running on Fridays at the weekends, but that's left 9 days in the second half of July when I've done nothing more strenuous that walk to and from my hotel. It's only a theory, but I reckon bodies adapt to what you do with them - and I've done a lot with mine so far this year. It's now rebelling at the lack of activity.

So, what to do? Well, it looks like I'm going to be here in Reading for at least the next five weeks, so it's time to desert the Premier Inn and find a hotel with a gym. Even working till 7 every night gives you the chance to run for half an hour or so afterwards. I was thinking along those lines anyway, but there was a stabbing and "police line, do not cross" tape very close to my Premier Inn this morning, so that's given me the push I needed.

On that note, Reading is a strange place. There's been a lot of development in its centre and around the river that runs through it - it's quite attractive. Yet a faint air of menace hangs over the place in the evenings, even as early as 6 to 7pm. There seem to be a lot of eating, drinking and carousing establishments among the new developments, and the excess alcohol, plentiful homeless and numerous smackheads wandering round combine to make it seem slightly threatening. I suspect if I was more familiar with similar size places in this country I'd find the same.

Anyway, time to go and spend my last night in the Premier Inn, sitting in my pants and eating M&S salad delights. It's not quite Alan Partridge-like, but it's not far off. I can feel your envy from here...  

10 Reasons To Love Summer

1. Beer. It tastes better in the summer (apart from bitter, which is not better, it's worser, unless it's best bitter, in which case it's only slightly worser best bitter). This observation is restricted though to lager-type beers of the sort I don't usually drink. Apart from Carlsberg and Heineken, which remain chemical-laden abominations that should be poured down the drain, not your gullet.
   
2. Mrs Monmarduman. She can be tempted into cycling shorts and on to her bike. Yesterday she cycled further than she ever had before - 27 miles - and apart from slightly stiff wrists (which are in any case a legacy of breaking them both in an alcohol-related incident in the dim-and-distant) suffered no ill effects. We had a lovely ride along a cycle track/bridleway up to Marple and back down the canal towpath. I did, however, get a puncture on the way home, and had to walk a couple of miles. Mrs M suggested that I had, in fact, let my own tyre down as I was struggling to keep up.
   
3. Cricket. My sporting second love. I reached the heady heights of the Cheshire Under-16 team in my playing career, but the truth is it's the only sport which I've happier to watch than play. I became semi-obsessed with the stats and facts that dominate the game as a kid, and I still love it, particularly when England are doing well against the old enemy. No, not Scotland, the Aussies. I also love it when Australians you meet vehemently deny having the slightest interest in the game during summers like this one.
   
4. Trousers. More to the point, the fact you don't need to wear them. This has always been true, but more so since I had cyclists' legs that don't need hiding.
   
5. Daylight at 6am. I loathe getting up in the dark. I also like being able to go running or cycling when the local wildlife (not a euphemism) is just waking up too - a heron was so sleepy this morning when I ran past him he couldn't be bothered to flap away from the canal bank. There were but inches between us.
   
6. Eating outside. It's not just barbeques (though Mrs M's homemade tandoori turkey burgers are to die for) I'll happily take my porridge outside. It just feels so Mediterranean.
   
7. The cat. Becomes nocturnal again, meaning that much of the time there's only two rather than the usual three of us on the bed, meaning in turn I get to sprawl out and sleep better.
   
8. Festivals. You can keep your Glastonbury and your V, the place to be is the Macclesfield Sheep Dog Trials, which take place but a stone's throw from our front gate two weeks from now. Don't be misled by the title, there's a veritable cornucopia of delights - viz. a fell race, corn dolly making demonstrations, a caravan club rally and evening concerts by people you last heard of in the '70s. Little & Large, take a bow.
   
9. Fruit in the garden. Raspberries, strawberries, rhubarb, and this year, blueberries. Sometimes there's enough for nearly half a bowl of fruit salad.
   
10. The Tour de France. It's wonderful. You know why, I go on about often enough on here. As I write, the final stage that starts at Versailles and concludes under a floodlit Champs Elysee is just about to start, which means I must take my leave....

Happy holidays, for those about to pack. I salute you.

Back to life, back to reality

My five and a bit weeks of unpaid irresponsibility are coming to an end, and it's time to reluctantly start thinking again about clients, suits and meetings rather than boulangeries, grimpeurs and croque monsieurs.

However, I'll try to pick the bones out of yet another trip to France first. This time the focus was on two things: watching the Tour de France in the Pyrenees, and riding my bike in the Pyrenees. The two coincided last Saturday and Sunday, and we've since had another five days of bike riding. The other facts are these before I reflect more on the sights, sounds and experiences. I travelled with Guy, buddy of cycling and many other things, from Bristol to Toulouse and back. We were part of a group of 15, comprising 6 Brits, 1 Canadian, 1 New Zealander and 7 Australians, (14 blokes and 1 woman). Our hosts were Pyractif, a travel company specialising in cycling holidays, and very excellent they were too, as always. I rode 428 miles, relatively little for seven days, but they were tough miles - we climbed well over 40,000 feet and the temperature rarely dropped below 30c, rising at times to 38 or so. Above around 28c I sweat so much I lose the electrolytes that stop you cramping, so keeping their levels high has been a constant battle this week.

Anyway, I'm going to try as usual to avoid this being a Dear Diary of the week. Instead, I'll split it into two - the madness of the Tour last weekend, and the riding since. The Tour; across here (I'm writing this at Toulouse airport), it's not just a sporting event, it's as much part of the culture as, say, a Royal Wedding or complaining about the weather is in the UK. Whole families turn out to watch it; they turn up hours in advance to stake their claim to a spot on the road; they bring picnics, wine, face paint, jollity, and their elderly maiden aunts who've been locked in the attic for years. It's a day out, a celebration of France, its countryside, and the fact that some the world's eyes are on it, albeit briefly. And the watching of 180 or so men in lycra ride past on a bicycle is, if more than incidental to the enjoyment of the day, at least not at its core. That core consists of the being there first and foremost, and the publicity caravan secondarily. The 'caravan', as it's generally known, is a procession of 200 vehicles adorned to varying levels of bonkers-ness in their sponsors colours. Supermarkets, countries, washing powders, newspapers, bookies - all of them are in their. I may have mentioned this last year, but my favourite is Cochonou, dried sausage makers, and their fleet of 2cv's, including a stretch 2cv, of which I got a cracking picture this year - see my Facebook page for that and many other delights.

But the caravan does more than provide visual entertainment - it gives stuff away. Washing liquid samples, caps, sun hats, key rings, bottles of water and all other manner of assorted tat are hurled from the vehicles at anything between 20 and 40 mph. And the French just can't get enough of it. They turn up with empty rucksacks, elderly shepherds take their crooks for hooking wayward items from the undergrowth, and middle aged women are perfectly prepared to wrestle drunken Dutchmen for big green foam hands, or at least that's what I witnessed on the Port de Pailheres last Saturday. But it stays good humoured, and a healthy barter-based market builds up at the roadside - "I'll swap you my small packet of Haribot for a polka dot cap". It's daft and it's pointless, but it gets everyone talking, sharing drinks, stories and views of the race. Which then comes past an hour later, a whirl of bright kits, dozens of team cars, police on motorbikes, race commissars in their red Skodas, and anything up to 8 helicopters low enough to deafen you, providing TV pictures around the world. It's a few minutes of a chaotic, noisy, exciting whirlwind. And when it's gone, there's a scramble to get home or to the nearest bar to watch the climax of the days racing.

We were lucky both days last weekend - the race was well and truly on, the peloton in many parts, broken apart by attacks both tactical and kamikaze. And on Sunday we could not have been closer to the riders as they got to the top of a tough, hot climb. It was reassuring, having done exactly the same climb as them three hours earlier, to see the same pain and distress on their faces as there was on ours at the same point. Less reassuring was realising they'd done in 30 mins what took us an hour. But we knew that already - from our vantage point we'd been able to see them battling up the climb for several kilometres. It was a brilliant day, the sort you can't really plan. Unbeatable. 

And so to the riding. In addition to the two days of 50 mile rides to our Tour viewing spots, we did one one extremely difficult day (made worse in my case by some self-inflicted idiocy, as I shall describe), one difficult day, one quite hard day and two relatively easy days. We bagged some classic Cols, including the giants Tourmalet and Port de Bales. I'll say no more; it was hard and hot on the way up, fast and exciting on the way down. But my idiocy; on Monday I left my phone and money at a cafe at the top of the Col de Mente, and didn't realise till some time later. There was only one way to retrieve them (for they were still there of course, this being rural France), and that was to go back up the Col: 10km of very hot road at a 9% gradient after 3 earlier climbs. What took me 40 mins in the morning took 55 at 1pm. I was indescribably hot. When I got to the top retrieving my valuables was a distant second priority to sticking my head in a bowl of cold water, which I did to the slight bemusement of the  cafe staff. When they found out what I'd done they insisted on giving me a Lion bar, despite the fact I'd just eaten two, and that it was so hot it would melt before I was barely out of the door. Still, bless them.

And then later that day came one of the monster climbs, meaning that by Monday night I'd ridden 96 miles and climbed just under 12,000 feet. I could barely hold my knife and fork to feed myself. But it wasn't the distance and the ascent that were the killers; it was the heat. I wasn't complaining though. After the rain, snow and wind of the last few months it was just part of the fantastic riding environment down here. But all that's at an end now. There's another week of the Tour to act as our methadone after this week's heroin, but it'll be cold turkey well and truly a week on Monday. Still, what a high.

He's off again

Sustainable. Postcode lottery. Deprived. Call out. Innovative. Hard working families. Vulnerable. Take very seriously. Solutions. Learnings. Independent enquiry. Investment. Going forward.

Laziness. Corporate double-speak. Jargon. Cliches. Oversimplifications. Journalistic twaddle.

The collection of perfectly good words in the first paragraph (and I'm sure I could have added many more had I had a brainstorm with myself [yes; irony-alert]) have become one or more of the things in the second paragraph. I hadn't realised how much we're bombarded with them until I was listening to a Direct Line spokesman (for he was male) explain why important people from his organisation were on Merseyside that day when they were announcing the closure of a Direct Line office. It was "to help our people through this important change process" apparently. They were there to give them their redundancy notices. I'm not sure what offends me the most, "our people" (they won't be for long, will they?), or "change process" (you're sacking them).  I don't expect businesses to be a charities, tough decisions have to be taken, but don't dress it up in nonsensical language, it just insults our intelligence.

I mention all this merely because over the last few weeks I've been avoiding the media's worst excesses mainly by not watching the news, and I've got another week and a half of avoiding work-based idiocy by, er, not being at work. Instead, in the next 10 days, I shall have a whole different set of well-worn phrases going through my head: amazing scenery, classic climb, fantastic descent, swooping corner, cloudless sky, aching limbs probably principal among them.

Yup, it's finally time for the Pyrenees. There's a nice hors d'oeuvre tomorrow, with t'eldest's graduation ceremony in Bath, a very splendid fish course over the weekend seeing the professional riders tackle some Pyrenean cols in the TdF, then the tasty main course of riding some of those same hills next week. Can't wait.

Bringing life to the kingdom of doing

The driven and the fortunate end up doing jobs that they love; that reward them emotionally and financially, if they're lucky. The rest of us sometimes have to pick between the two, sometimes we don't get either. I've had brief moments in the last 25 years when the two have come together, and for the rest of the time, I've at least earned enough money to not have to worry about the bills too much.

But on Tuesday morning this week, I had a vision of the fantasy job that I'd do if it existed or I had the cojones to try to invent it - a cycling historian. I'd lead bike tours from Caen in Normandy round the coast to St. Malo in Brittany, recounting the history of the landing beaches, bringing the events of 1944 alive for whoever was interested in them, but wanted to experience more than just read a book or spend an hour out of their air-conditioned car at a war grave site or a museum. The anointed among us already know that bicycling is God's own method of transport - slow enough to take in sights, sounds, smells and other people's conversations, fast enough to alleviate boredom. So doing that whilst giving a mobile history lesson in what happened 69 years ago (and in the months before and after), and its consequences for how we live now and why the world is arranged as it is, strikes me as an ideal way of earning a living.

But let's rewind a bit. I'd arrived 'home' in Ploeuc-sur-Lie a week last Monday with a bad hand and a miserable head. I moped around for a day or so, wondering what to do and how to make the best of my time in France, and whether I'd need to get any medical attention. Fortunately, the swelling round the knuckles began to go down a bit, and I got a bit of movement back in my fingers. The revised plan evolved into staying at the house till the end of the following weekend (i.e. the one just gone), doing house jobs - for there is always something that needs painting / mending / cleaning / mowing - and riding the bike as much as possible around that, until Monday morning, when I'd take a two day route back to St. Malo via Avranches and Mont St. Michel.

(Unbelievably, given my love of the Tour de France, when I made that plan, I'd forgotten that this year's route makes its way from Nantes to St Malo on Tuesday 9th July, and there's a 'contre le montre' [time trial], from Avranches to Mont St. Michel the following day. Which meant that I spent Monday and Tuesday this week riding large parts of the exact routes of those two days completely fortuitously and inadvertently).

Living at the house for six days without a car was quite interesting, given that we're two miles from the village itself and much further to anywhere of note. It gave me a real insight into what it would be like to live car-less. You can do it - when a) you've not got a job and therefore have plenty of time, b) can rely on delivery services for anything bigger than will fit on or be towed by a bike, and c) it's never winter. I've uploaded pictures to Facebook of shopping and recycling with a bike, and I even did a 45 mile round trip to buy a 5 kg bag of cement I needed for some work outside the house. No pictures of that one, which is a shame, as 5 kg of bulk in one pannier and 0 kg in the other is enough to unbalance the bike, and means you end up riding whilst leaning slightly to provide some counter-balance.

Anyway, Monday morning rolled around and I rolled away from Ploeuc north-east towards Avranches. As is impossible not to do in France I passed through countless meticulously-maintained villages and hamlets, took pictures of a fraction of the number of mightily impressive churches I saw (which all seem to be disproportionately large for the size of place in which they're situated; those with a better knowledge than me of the Catholic church and its role in French life could undoubtedly tell me why that is), and lunched more-or-less at the spot in Evran where there will be the intermediate sprint on Stage 10 of this year's Tour. The route was deliberately meandering, meaning I'd covered 95 miles by the time I rolled into the F1 hotel at Avranches.

Now, I don't know how many of you have stayed in a F1 in France. If you haven't, then to give you an idea of what they're like, they make Travelodges feel like the Ritz. There's no en suite (you pad down the corridor to shared facilities), you get a towel marginally bigger than a postage stamp, and there's no reception - it's all automated. Which at least means there's nobody to moan at you for taking your bike to your room. I'm not complaining about any of this - the rooms are clean, cheap (I paid 31€), and after a tent, unbelievably luxurious.

So, Monday was good. Tuesday was better, but I'll come to that. For all the virtues of rural France, it's not without its parochialism. As I was buying my lunchtime provisions on Monday a Frenchman struck up a conversation with me about what I was doing, where I'd come from, and so on. When he asked me about my starting point that day I chose not to say the village name, as I was 40 miles away by then. So I said "Moncontour", the next town of any size. Nope, he'd not heard of that. Nor had he heard of Lamballe, from where you can pick up TGVs to Paris. To put this in context for my local readers, it's like being in Chester and a native there not having heard of Wilmslow. Unbelievable. Still, the gentlemen in question (in his 70s) was wearing a white golfing cap, a shiny blue three-quarter length shellsuit, topped off (bottomed off?) with white sports socks and black brogues, so perhaps I shouldn't be altogether surprised. There you go, look-ist and age-ist in a single sentence.

Tuesday didn't start auspiciously - for the first time in my cycling career I had a spoke problem, a very loose one on the verge of snapping to be specific. As good fortune would have it, I was only a mile or so from a Decathlon store, so I popped in there to get it tightened, and I was soon on my way, hugging the coast road all the way from Avranches to St Malo. In a straight line, it's only 35 miles or so, but I extended that to 65 by going down the tiniest roads I could find, the only criterion for selection being it had to be the one closest to the shoreline. And what a shoreline - the bay of Mont St. Michel is glorious, though I suspect nearing its best on a sunny June weekday morning when there aren't too many other people around. The Mont itself is France's second most popular tourist destination after the Eiffel Tower, but as long as you create your own Tourist Exclusion Zone by riding down the back roads near it, you can avoid the worst excesses of the peculiar culture that seems to accompany anywhere that attracts large numbers of camera-equipped Japanese and Americans. Again, see my Facebook page for pics.

I lunched in Pontorson, mid-afternooned in Cancale overlooking the oyster farms, and arrived in St Malo early evening. One of the great things about being on a bike rather than in a car means they seem to let you on ferries first, meaning that by the time the great unwashed were boarding on Tuesday, not only was I washed (showered actually; public showers on a ferry - how civilised), but I was also changed, seated and with beer.  As ever, both in the ferry queue with fellow cyclists, and on the boat with everyone else, obviously being a touring cyclist attracts conversation and comments, possibly more so when you're travelling alone. It was fun; time passed quickly and before I knew it I was back among the lovely British, with their aggression, their cramped space and their b*****d London buses. But it would be a shame to finish on a negative, so I won't, because...

....Eight days at home, then I'm off again to France, the Pyrenees in fact, as I think I may have mentioned once or twice before now......

Pulling defeat from the jaws of victory....and vice versa

So, where were we? I was just about to leave for France to do some touring. That was a couple of weeks ago. A reasonable amount has happened since then, certainly enough to justify a couple of pots under normal circumstances. However, this might just turn into one long one, missus. Just to warn you. 

As ever the temptation is to turn the thing into prolonged diary entry ("and on Tuesday I had a very nice  cup of coffee"), you know the sort of thing. So I'm going to try not to do that, and pick out the highlights, and indeed lowlights, out of the last 11 days. 

Let's start with the biggest lowlight. Now, this blog is nothing if not honest, so it's with relief that I'm going to admit the following hiding behind a keyboard rather than face-to-face with any of you. Thought that might happen in time I guess, dammit. I didn't do the tour I planned, well not much of it anyway. That's not the embarrassing bit however. And neither is the reason - I badly injured my left hand, causing it to swell like a balloon, not be able to grip anything, and generally be useless for a week or so. Nope, the embarrassing bit is how I injured my hand. It was putting my tent up. Now you might ask, not unreasonably, how it's possible to injure a hand putting a tent up. Hitting it with a mallet whilst hammering a tent peg in might be a feasible answer. But it wasn't that. It was making it go bendy. Don't laugh. I was trying to fix the bendy bits (the ones that give the tent its height) into position by putting a pin in the end of one of them. I was doing it with my left hand, when all of a sudden, my big finger started hurting. Quite a lot. I looked down, and was a little startled to see to it resting under, and in parallel with my ring finger. I'd somehow managed to dislocate it. Now, a French campsite on a sleepy Sunday afternoon doesn't exactly have medical attention, or indeed other people, on tap, so there was no option but to re-locate the finger myself. Talk about seeing stars, I saw a whole galaxy, but with a sickening click I got it back in. It then popped out another couple of times whilst I finished putting the damn tent up, but I eventually managed it, before collapsing inside to take one of all the painkillers I could find.

It was not a happy night that Sunday. My hand throbbed, my stomach remained empty as the campsite didn't have a restaurant and I couldn't face getting back on the bike, and the rain rained. All night. My towel stayed wet beside me, and my mood darkened with the clouds. Morning brought no relief, in fact the hand was worse. I had a decision to make therefore about what to do. The options were to carry on as planned, carry on the route as planned but not camp, or go back home and consider my options. The first was out of the question; I could barely get the tent down one-handed, let alone put it up. The second was tempting, but I knew there were no hotels to be had within riding distance of Le Mans, because of the 24 Hour race, which is why I too was headed there. So the route was going to have to change anyway, and for that reason (and there was an element of crawling into a corner to lick my wounds) I decided to ride the 75 miles home.

Even that was easier said than done. I couldn't get my riding mitts on, the hand was too swollen. More significantly, I could neither brake nor change gear with my left hand, meaning downhills had to be taken much more slowly than usual, and uphills were all done in the big ring. Good strength training I told myself. 

All of which shows the folly of breaking one of the golden rules you set for yourself. One of mine I set when I was 18. I went on a self-guided walking and camping holiday in the Lake District. It was September, and it rained solidly for 3 of the 4 days I was there. Everything I owned was so wet you had to wring it out, and apart from anything to do with Powerpoint presentations it was one of the most miserable experiences of my life. But showing rare balance and perspective for an 18 year old (I like to think) I did not disavow either camping or being vehicle-less, just combining the two. You see, if it rains but you've got a car you've still got somewhere to dry things out, a sanctuary of sorts. Or if you're walking or riding and get soaking wet, bedraggled and cold, none of which I particularly mind, you still need a hot shower and a half-decent bed at the end of a day.

Anyway, I tried to combine camping and riding. I broke my rule and I paid the price. I slunk home with my metaphorical tail firmly between my legs, my plans in tatters.....

You know what, I am going to spilt this holiday blog into two after all. Bite-sized chunks and all that. And I can end on a cliffhanger.....did I go home and weep into my absinthe for a week? Did I retire to my bed, emerging only to curse in French at the much-too-cheerful sparrows outside my window? Or did I salvage both a modicum of pride and quite a lot of pleasure from the time that remained? All will be revealed, probably on Thursday....

Kids, who'd have 'em?

The confluence of a few things means that this is going to be a (short) post about that most boring of subjects - to other people - kids. Mine to be specific.

So what are those things of which I write? In no particular order, Father's Day on Sunday, the end of GCSEs, the posting of a new blog, and t'eldest getting a job. Now, being a stiff upper-lipped kind of Englishman I'm naturally going to be inadequate at expressing my true feelings about most things, other than the quality of my breakfast marmalade and other people's driving skills obviously, so I'm using this medium to express some pride in my children. Hopefully not in that sentimental, aren't-they-lovely-just-cos-they're-my-kids kind of way, but for solid achievements.

Youngest completes her GCSEs tomorrow after a long, hard slog. We think she's going to do pretty well, and her plan is a welcome break in family tradition, being to pursue a life scientific rather than one based in arts or humanities. She's planning to do predominantly maths and science A-levels and with luck and hard work, continue from there. I salute her desire to do something new (for us lot), and her drive.

Middle 'un is beginning to develop his writing skills for a time two years from now when he'll be thrown into the harsh battle to survive in our world with only a degree in Philosophy as his shield. He's started a cracking blog on American Football - not my bag but it reads like he knows what he's talking about - and I'm hoping to vicariously lead a writer's life through his work in future years.

As for t'eldest, we can finally breathe a sigh of relief. She heard last night that after 4 rounds of selection, she's secured a role with Network Rail, spending a fully-expensed year at Warwick Uni from September doing a post-grad qualification, after which she'll move into project management with them, looking after who knows what? Possibly part of the HS2 development if it goes ahead, possibly something less controversial like station redevelopments. It's a brilliant role anyway, and she played a blinder in being selected for it.

I was tempted to apologise at this point for the subject matter, but I'm not going to. Children, wife, friends, politics, books (no significance intended by the order of that list); these are all important things, and all deserve some airtime occasionally in addition to the usual bike-riding nonsense.

Anyway, just to finish the subject off, I've got my Father's Day card packed in my panniers, which I'll open just before I peddle down to the south Breton coast. On reflection, I probably won't take my ipad with me, so it'll be tweeting only for the next 10 days or so.  Till next time then...