My Eleventh Week as a Budding Author 

In 1898 H G Wells wrote the “War of the Worlds” and in that book he made a subtle prediction that has proved correct across the centuries. The prediction was not that some spindly legged aliens would take over town centres and dominate us all. So we can let Peter Crouch live he offers us no threat. His key postulation was that the common cold leads to downfall.

I won’t hesitate to agree with Herbert George, he showed great insight, but I’m not convinced that he’d applied “downfall” to the relevant user group. As far as I am aware we have yet to fend off any extraterrestrial master races by sneezing on them, maybe coughs and snuffles act as such a deterrent that they’ve all stayed away. Sophisticated alien spectroscopes have scanned our galaxy, identified earth based snot and posted a bloody great “Biohazard..keep out” notice on the dark side of the moon.

But, the common cold has lead to my sporting downfall on a number of occasions and this week in a cruel twist of fate the two sports I take part in were united by the disease. I was invited to dinner with a group of scuba diving friends. I’ve made a few bubbles in my time and we were going to discuss the feasibility of a few diving trips later this year. The diver’s number one enemy is the common cold. To put it bluntly it can kill you, going to depth with blocked up sinuses is an extremely bad idea and so as soon as you get a cold, you can’t go diving.

Therefore, I was “mildly surprised” to find that dinner with the divers was punctuated with a soundtrack of sniffs, nasal grunts, throat clearances and coughs. The bloody divers all had colds.

Cycling and colds do not mix well either. It’s not quite as extreme as scuba diving and I have yet to hear of a cyclist who has died as a direct result of a trip out on the bike with a head cold. However, it’s never a good idea to cycle with the sniffles. Firstly, they have a bad habit of morphing into highly resilient, chest battering flu attacks and secondly every single piece of apparel you own soon becomes covered in snot. There is a distinct art to clearing ones nose when cycling and I can claim to be at the top of my game in terms discrete nasal emptying. However, a cold puts paid to these hard won skills as each snort releases a champagne supernova of the stuff all over your nice clean lycra. You end up looking like you’ve survived a stampede of snails. 

So I was sat there listening to the cacophony of illness wondering whether etiquette allowed me to get up, declare them “unclean” and leave. But being the polite, mild mannered person you all know and love, I “grinned and bear”ed it. And caught the cold. 

“What the hell has this got to do with writing the book?”, I hear my reader cry. Well, quite a lot actually as writing the book requires a large amount of riding to be undertaken, and as I have patiently explained above, colds are not conducive to large amounts of riding. I’d planned a huge great loop in Wales taking in several large climbs, and on Tuesday I set out to do it with the cold brewing. You all know how it feels at that point when you are well aware that you’ve caught the cold, but it hasn’t yet got the guts to come out and show its true colours.

As I drove along the M4 and over the bridge I had misgivings. I had a bit of a headache, slight snuffles and a tinge of sore throatness, I pressed on regardless. I felt OK’ish as I straddled the bike but fifteen miles into the ride it was clear that whilst the engine had plenty of fuel it wasn’t performing at all efficiently. I felt each turn of the pedal and my head seemed to be three times too large for my helmet but I wasn’t prepared to abandon, the drive had been too long for that.

Fortunately the ride I had planned was a belter. My woes were worn away as the road marched up into the Brecon Beacons, pain erased by views coupled with the tranquility of a quiet mid-week bike ride. I stopped to eat something at the bottom of a huge great climb (the Bwlch) and heard a voice say “Hello”. I looked from left to right searching for its owner, but they weren’t there, it was only when I looked down that I spotted the guy on a handbike at my feet. 

He’d been paralysed seven years previously whilst out mountain biking and had lost the use of his lower body. Yet there he was on a bike, at the bottom of a major climb about to climb over 1100 feet using only his arms. We chatted for quite a while about his racing ambitions, he planned to travel to France, Spain and other countries to race with other handbike riders.

Eventually we parted company and I headed off up the climb. It was going to take him a while to do it and he had shooed me on in front of him. I didn’t say anything, but he’d proved to be the perfect antidote to my cold. There was me fretting away about doing a bike ride with a stuffed up nose when this guy only has one third of his body available to him. He was out there on his own and had planned a pretty hefty loop unsupported. After that encounter my whole respiratory system obeyed orders and I just got on with the ride, (actually I was nervous that he’d come hooning past me and make me look a fool on the climb).

The cold gave me another day of respite and during a rest day I’ve pushed the word count on both of my projects significantly, until Thursday when I finally succumbed to its clutches. The nasty little germs headed south into my lungs. Old Herbert George would have been looking down on me with a wry smile as, like one of his fictional tripods, I keeled over and became completely ineffective. I tried my hardest to write, plan routes, think, research anything to move the projects forward, but ended up defeated. I actually watched half an episode of Bargain Hunt.

The only thing I have to show for Thursday is some comfort food. I hereby proudly present a picture of my home made gnocchi in tomatoe sauce. Bollocks to the cycling book, I’m going to become the next Gordon Ramsey. I can definitely swear as well as he can, my face is pretty cratered and I think Gary Rhodes is a twat.

After hours of self pity I reached for whatever remedies I could find in a wretched attempt to alleviate the suffering. The picture below shows the order that I took them going from left to right. It also shows the relative effectiveness of each, again ordered from left to right. After a few decent measures of remedy three I no longer cared about the cold or anything else to be frank.

So on Friday I arose from my pit of despair and gave myself a right good kick up the arse. I sat down at the Mac and planned a monster week of riding and writing. The weather for next week is looking good so I’m tempted to spend the weekend finishing off remedy number three in order to kill this cold once and for all.

Finally, just to make myself feel a little better I’ve gathered a few statistics on progress to date:-

• Total words written, all projects: 39,000
• Total photographs taken: 950
• Hours spent riding: 129.6
• Miles ridden: 1752
• Feet climbed: 121,639
• Number of punctures: 5
• Bikes purchased: 2
• Total income to date: £0

Obviously the last two key performance indicators are of some concern. The businessman on my right shoulder would like to hold a board meeting to discuss the balance sheet. But the entrepreneur on the left is shouting him down with words like “investment”, “future return” and “get Helen to work more hours”. I bet you didn’t know that HG Wells was into cycling? He even wrote a short novel entitled “The Wheels of Chance”, it is based around the character Mr Hoopdriver who is full of “Mitt-esque fantasies” and has shaky riding skills. Hmmm, I’m worried that Herbert George predictions go further than the potential impact of the common cold........

Dave

18th March 2011

WEEK TWELVE>>>>