My Sixth Week as a Budding Author

If you are going to write a non-fiction book then it is probably quite important that you gather some content. When your book is about cycling that content can be gathered via a number of different mechanisms:-

• listening intently to elders recounting their fascinating tales of the past whilst smelling of wee
• typing “cycling content” into google and mercilessly cutting-and-pasting the results
• thumbing through old books in libraries wishing that Google would finish their grand project to scan and index all the world’s information
• riding a bike around the place and gabbling madly into a Dictafone about views

This week I’d run out of elders, exhausted google and was too flatulent for libraries so I resorted to the bike instead. I therefore spent Monday planning rides, this is “oh so easy” to do when you have Tracklogs and a screen full of digital maps. Clicking merrily away at the route completely hides the fact that what appears to be a nice yellow line on screen, is in reality a heinous shite strewn potholed lane littered with hawthorn cuttings and the natural habitat of reckless tractor drivers with huge great pointy pitchforky attachments on the front of their beasts.

And so, lulled into a false sense of security by my computer, I threw an assortment of cycling stuff into the motorhome and trundled off down to Dartmoor for the first big ride of the week. The epicness began before I’d even got out of the van, again entirely due to my trust in technology, namely the blind following of the sat nav. I’d booked myself into a campsite on a farm, which should maybe be re-advertised as “a muddy field” if it is to adhere to the Trade Descriptions Act properly.

There are two approaches to this farm, the sensible wide one and, what can only be described as a “small thin tunnel through trees”. Unfortunately the tunnel takes the direct route, and so did the sat nav. I’m amazed I got the van through it with the sleeping bits still attached to the chassis. I nearly missed the farm as well, but luckily Mr Giles was waiting for me by the gate swinging a lamp to wave me into his field. How many times have I read of the woes of feckless sat nav followers, and here I was gaining full membership of their clan.

The shower block advertised on his site was in need of a few upgrades. I’ve added a picture below for you to make up your own mind. The loo had no light, resulting in a new first for me, my scariest ever poo. If only I’d had the video camera, I could have taken the Blair Witch Project into new territory

But being a hardy sort of fellow, I made the most of it, got a good night’s sleep and headed out onto the moor bright and early the next day. I won’t dwell too much on the ride as that is for the book. However, I will regale you with an interesting fact. Dartmoor is unusual geographically as it only has uphill. You can try all you like to go downhill but it just won’t work. no matter where you cycle, you’ll be going uphill. And I did what felt like 70 tortuous miles of uphill.

Going back to the point I made earlier about PC mapping, none of these packages have a setting that allows you to display the ever increasing amount of pain you will suffer as the ride goes on (Andy, new feature opportunity?). If they did, the Dartmoor ride would have started at level “ouch”, moved onto “amputation without anesthetic” and ended at “please leave me here to die, I cannot suffer any more”.

So, you’ll get the picture that it was quite hard. And what better way to follow it with a short recovery ride in Exmoor. Well, that would have been a good plan if the recovery ride did not involve Porlock Hill. I’ve been slowly ticking off the climbs from Simon Warren’s book “100 Greatest Cycling Climbs” and Porlock Hill is in it. Therefore, I planned a brief 25 mile scouting ride starting up this hill.

Describing the ride up Porlock Hill without using cliches is almost as hard as cycling up it. The writer is tempted into adjectives such as “brutal”, “fearsome”, “impossible” etc.. I’m going to try a different tack.

Imagine that you get on your bike and cycle up to the first corner, as you ascend this corner Chris Tarrant pops up beside the road and offers you five hundred thousand pounds to get off your bike and walk. But, despite this offer you persevere, at the next bend he doubles his offer to one million pounds, simply to get off and walk.

You have to ignore this hugely tempting offer and keep riding but, as you round the corner, he doubles it again and walks (!) beside you up the hill maintaining the offer for nearly three miles.

Hopefully that conveys how hard this is climb at this time of year. The pain is so intense and the temptation to dismount so huge that only the mind can carry you up to the top. I dragged myself up it by imagining the huge satisfaction of continuously screaming “F**k Off” at Chris Tarrant. The rest of the ride was a peach. Beautiful empty roads, a lack of rain and no more Porlock type hills.

On Thursday I drove to Wells in order to scout out a long ride that includes an ascent of Cheddar Gorge. This was going to be a nice relaxing day out on the bike as Richard Angwin, the Points West weatherman, had assured me that any rain should be gone by the morning.

Well Richard, it is nice to see you upholding the long standing tradition of the UK Met office for understatement. A more accurate weather forecast would have read something along the lines of:-

 “Wherever Dave is riding ..it will rain”

I’ve asked my talented son to create me a weather picture that illustrates this point and the animation below is what Jake (13) came up with. Don’t show it to Richard Angwin, he’ll cack himself when he finds out that a thirteen year old boy can create more accurate weather maps than himself. It certainly depicts the reality of my day on the bike during which my Dictaphone sadly passed away, killed by drowning.

All was not lost though as I got to ride the bike up Cheddar Gorge. Normally I do this in the height of summer and the climb is made even more challenging by the fat Americans that block the lower slopes as they scuttle from twee shop to shop laden down with fancily wrapped cheese that is one quarter the price in Tescos.

On a wet Thursday in February, the shops are mostly closed. The Americans are all safely tucked away in KFC and the gorge is empty.

It was like being in a different Cheddar. In the absence of tourists, the Gorge had regained some of its wildness and majesty, despite 70 miles in the legs I felt energised. I even attacked for a while, until a little bit of Porlock still locked in the thighs cried “Whooooa there boy!”. But the climb is steady enough to gain a proper rhythm, I tentatively clicked down the block, gripped the brake hoods and lifted a Pantani fantasy from the memory bank. I was properly absorbed, engaged and yet lost within the climb. I lamented the end of the gorge as it winds out of the Mendip rock up onto the downs. I was soaked, tired, hungry and a little bit cold but all of these stimuli were overriden by the joy of the climb. In fact I think I might copyright the phrase “The Climber Sutra” for experiences such as these.

It’s moments like that which hammer home the privilege I have in my hugely supportive wife and family who enable me to undertake this project. I repaid that privilege by returning home with a black bin liner full of the wet muddy rancid cycling gear and depositing it unopened pleadingly close to the washing machine.

On Friday I wrote. Fifteen thousand words now in the bank with five thousand other little tinkerings that I’ve been messing about with. This stuff is all very draft though and next week I hope to revisit it and jazz it all up a bit into almost readable form.

I’ve also paid a visit to a physiotherapist for some further knee pain investigation. The good news is that there appears to be nothing pathologically wrong. I think this means that the bits are all there as they should be. The bad news is that I’m getting old and in his own words “Like a car that has been running for years you need a bit of a service”. The term “service” had me scared for a few seconds as he was massaging my leg at the time, but it turns out that this involves sorting out posture and balance. I get the feeling that it is a clever way of making me adopt humiliating positions in a gym and then paying for it. Luckily due to my wife actually having a job with healthcare, BUPA will be paying for this humiliation.

Finally, you may not know that Helen, my wife, carried on working at the company I left last year. It looks like things have gone downhill in my absence as shown by Helen's diary entry (in green) for today. 

Dave

11th February 2011

WEEK SEVEN >>>>>