Australia

While I have been very much enjoying caning my aged collection of bikes round the back lanes of Scarborough for the last few months, I would like you to know that I am prepared to go literally to the ends of the earth to ride bikes and tell you about it.

Oh yes.

By way of proof, I would like to direct your attention to Exhibit A. That's A for Australia, baby!

Yes, me, Mrs Langsett and the little Langsetts have recently stared the travel apocalypse that is long haul flying with children full in the face. And - better yet - arrived at Sydney's Kingsford Smith airport, safe and sound, one beautiful sunny morning.

Ellie, the littlest Langsett, had been working overtime to set this up as the most awesome holiday ever. Not only had she been very satisfied with the wide selection of Mickey Mouse Clubhouse that was available on the flight out, she had also been busy inventing some cracking new compound words (she is learning to talk at the moment). Wriggling happily in her seat as we prepared to take off, she did her best 100-watt smile. "My on my holiplane!" she said. Me and Mrs Langsett thought this was hilarious, but Ellie wasn't done. She pointed to her sister's baseball cap, which she had - not to put too fine a point on it - stolen. "My have on my AustaliHat!"

So Mrs L was looking forward to seeing her big brother Andy, who moved out to Australia a few years back, and lives there with his missus Lisa and their two boys. And I was looking forward to getting some miles in, enjoying the gorgeous sunny weather that Oz is famous for:

Oh.

For an occasional rider of bicycles, Oz seemed likely to be pretty interesting. A few months before, the Prime Minister Tony Abbott had been advised by his ex-physician - the fantastically named Dr Killer - to give up his regular early morning bike rides.

"You know," said Dr Killer menacingly, "as a doctor I see all the accidents with coming off bikes and one day I think he is going to have one too."

This was a worry. The Lonely Planet guide had a bit at the back about how to come back from Australia alive. It described obstacles like deadly snakes, deadly crocodiles, deadly spiders (lots of those), deadly jellyfish (some so deadly that they continue to cause brain melting levels of pain AFTER YOU ARE DEAD), deadly bush fires, deadly downpours; the lot.

Mr Abbott is not a man inclined to hide in terror indoors either. His Wikipedia page lists him as an active volunteer fireman and a member of the Queenscliff Surf Life Saving Club, so he spends his free time blasting the bejesus out of raging fires and rescuing the unlucky from the pounding jellyfish infested surf, as well as cycling.

Which made me wonder: just how dangerous was the bike riding going to be if it was a bigger threat to the PM's health than - well, all of the other ways that just being in Australia can bring about your early demise?

Clearly, I was going to have to find out.

First of all, let me just say what an astounding country this is. We actually stayed slap bang in the middle of Mr Abbott's constituency:

And I don't think I will ever forget the drive from Sydney airport up to the Northern Beaches. Australians like their motorways exciting, and the one we followed popped up out of a tunnel right behind the Opera House, executed an improbable left hand turn to run fifty feet up in the air along the top of Circular Quay metro station, and then did another equally improbable right hand turn to deliver you onto the Harbour Bridge itself.

It was an entrancing sight. The view out of the car window was filled with stuff I'd seen a hundred times on the telly and in books, but all ten times as big and with colours ten times as vibrant. Sunlight danced on the blue water of the harbour, yachts and ferries headed this way and that and the Opera House looked down on it all. I had every intention of taking a picture, but I ended up just looking at it all.

"Alright, isn't it?" said Andy from the front seat.

We ended the day at North Curl Curl beach, watching the setting sun light up the turquoise Pacific Ocean, and feeling very much in love with the place.

It is impossible to go to Sydney without measuring it up favourably against other big cities around the world. If you're in the city centre in Sydney and you fancy dipping your toes in the ocean, then one of the most beautiful ferry journeys in the world will take you out to Manly in twenty five minutes and another five will see you getting pushed around by the boisterous Pacific.

If you want your fix faster than that, the harbour itself is fringed with literally hundreds of lovely beaches of all levels of seclusion. New York's got Staten Island of course, but if you want to get out to somewhere like Jones Beach and get the full nature showing you who's boss experience, that's a lot more involved. And London is far worse again - here's how TripAdvisor members responded to a desperate plea from a recently incarcerated dweller of the city for some fresh sea air:

"David J

London

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2. Re: Go to the beach near London

30 June 2013, 12:15

There isn't a beach near London. You can take a train to Southend or Brighton maybe , both mainly stony beaches though and both about a one hour train journey from central London. The nearest sandy beach is probably Margate or Clacton
Edited: 30 June 2013, 12:16

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EssexWanderer

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3. Re: Go to the beach near London

30 June 2013, 12:17

Southend-on-Sea is not stoney, but it is more muddy than sandy. Southend does have the distinction of having the longest Pleasure Pier in the world (Walton-on-the-Naze has the second longest....)"

Stony? Muddy? I could do that I guess, or I could go and live somewhere with some actual seaside...



I loved the people too. Just about everyone we met in Australia had a kind of understated competence. If I ever find myself stuck with a bunch of other people in some kind of mortal peril - volcano about to erupt perhaps, or cruise liner about to sink - I'll know to look for some Australians, because they will be the ones who will have exactly the right unlikely skill required to get out of the situation alive. I'd guess this comes from living somewhere which is both awesomely beautiful and really quite dangerous, at least compared with suburban England. I think that if you want to get the most out of Oz, you inevitably get a lot of practice at using your judgement. By way of an example, Andy and Lisa took us out to Narrabeen Lake for a picnic with some of their friends. The picnic started when all of the children jumped out of their mums and dads' cars (or in some cases, off their bikes), ran towards the lake carrying kayaks, surfboards and body boards and threw themselves headlong into the water, while Mrs L and I looked on, appalled.

Then we realised that the children were all exceptional swimmers, and that the mums and dads all knew the lake well and looked out for each others' children. There is an amount of risk inherent in swimming in a massive lake that opens into the sea. But instead of trying to avoid the risk by keeping the kids out of the lake, the other mums and dads had just taught their kids the skills they needed to be able to manage the risk themselves.

Right, let's talk bikes. There were a lot of them:

And some of them were very cool, like this Pashley Guvnor-a-like, complete with surfboard carrier:

Some of them were racy:

And some appeared at improbable heights above sea level:

That's Bald Hill above, with Coalcliff, Scarborough and Port Kembla in the background. I was immediately jealous of the lad with the touring bike, because the twisting, tree shadowed descent from Bald Hill to Stanwell Park is a peach. If you're reading this, and you're from Northern England, it is as if someone has moved the Snake Pass to the seaside.

If you squint a bit at the picture, you might be able to see the Sea Cliff Bridge, where the road is built on concrete pillars a hundred yards out at sea. When we got to our B&B that evening, I asked Glen, the owner, why they'd built the Sea Cliff Bridge.

"Rocks kept falling down and squishing cars when the road went along the bottom of the cliff." he deadpanned, without missing a beat.

When we got back to Sydney, Andy very kindly lent me his Specialized Allez, made the year before Specialized introduced the curved top tube and ruined bikes for ever.

The bike had a lot of gears, including a triple chainring up front - and I was very grateful for all of them. The Northern Beaches look like they're going to be pretty flat, but there are steep sided sandstone headlands separating each beach from its neighbours.

It was the golden hour when I set off, but because this was Sydney, the beaches were busy with serious surfers and the roads were pretty busy too. I headed north, through Dee Why, Collaroy and Narrabeen, and there was a steady stream of lads and ladies riding very plush bikes somewhat faster than I was going.

The Allez did me proud. The wide handlebars felt a bit strange, and the aluminium frame made a whole load of musical twanging noises at every opportunity. But it was comfortable to ride, and easy to wind it up to speed. Specialized were a bit shy about telling you how much it weighed but it certainly didn't feel noticeably lighter than my Aerospace. 

I looped around the lake at Narrabeen and headed back down the coast to the North Heads. This towering sandstone peninsula stands next to the entrance to Sydney Harbour, and gives you views out over the endless Pacific to one side, and back towards the city on the other.

It was still early on a Sunday morning, so I was in no way surprised to find that some other lads on bikes had got to the top of the Heads before me. In this case, it was a group of cardio-thoracic surgeons, discussing the week's operations and where to go for their coffee fix.

The attitude of the state government towards cycling in and around Sydney contrasts sharply with the awesomeness of actually riding a bike around this beautiful city. Roads Minister Duncan Gay in particular has a talent for not just being legendarily stupid about riding bikes, but making his stupidity a matter of policy. Recent high points include considering compulsory licenses as a response to cyclists being killed by motorists and removing a central Sydney bike lane on a whim. The bike lane, on College Street, carries as many commuters on bikes as does the rest of the road in cars at rush hour. At least he's honest. But in all seriousness, Sydney is a city that has traffic congestion on biblical scale. Why would you not back a form of transport which reduces congestion by a measurable amount, every time someone decides to use it?

 

I remember reading somewhere that Gay's objection to the College Street cycle path was born of sitting in his ministerial car, stuck in traffic, while cyclists passed  on the cycle path. I think that  giving the lad a pair of trouser clips and a nice new ministerial Pashley Roadster might go some way towards helping him be less of a dufus.

The Cinder Track

So, the weather was alright last Saturday:

The working week had actually been a bit grim. C, one of my clients, is trying to negotiate the sale of some land to a rapacious housebuilding company. The land in question is a green, perfect Garden of Eden, where even the soul-numbing prisons that the housebuilder favours will look good.

Naturally, the housebuilder is trying to screw the sale price down as low as possible.

So we had Dave, the housebuilder's tangerine cheeked land buyer, and Adrian, his pasty faced, David Cameron-look alike lawyer over to the 'borough to try and agree some terms.

Like a comedy double act - but without any comedy - Dave and Adrian swapped made up questions and made imaginary concessions to C's fairly reasonable request that they tell him using actual maths how much they propose to pay him for his land.

"We want to maximise value for you by putting a viability argument to the planning authority as to why affordable provision should be minimised."  said Dave, who had evidently taken quite a few porky pie pills before setting off that morning.

The routine - which Dave and Adrian had clearly done many times before - lasted three draining hours. But it came to an end at last, and when I rolled out of bed on Saturday morning, the snowdrops in the garden and the glow in the sky said it was time to take the bike for a blast up the coast.

I hauled the Inferno out of the tin shed which is its new home. The chain had been glued into shape by that special black, abrasive cement that comes off British roads in winter time, and it made a load of musical squeaks as I leaned on the pedals and wound the Inferno up to a decent speed.

NCN Route 1 more or less goes through my back garden, and the Scarborough to Whitby section is a beautiful 21 mile ride through some of the loveliest scenery in the UK. This stretch even has a great name: the Cinder Track. It would have been rude not to.

Above, proof that even though the Inferno was made at the exact moment that the British cycle industry vanished, leaving only a faint whiff of 3-in-1 oil to show it had ever existed, it is still a reasonable means of transport.

Looking the other way, you can get a hint of the Olympian awesomeness of Ravenscar. I'm not sure if you can see it on that picture, but there's a container ship out there at sea. I was up so high that it looked too tiny to even be a child's toy. Even the sunlight twinkling on the sea was miniaturised by the dizzying seven hundred foot drop to the waves.

And just over the top of the hill is the extraordinarily lovely Robin Hoods Bay, memorably described by Rob Ainsley as a "...vertically laned Cornish fishing village, magically teleported to the Yorkshire coast."

There's only one thing to dull the shine, and that's the rutted, bashed up surface of the track. If you have a look at Sustrans' map of the Cinder Track you'll see there are six little warning triangles between Whitby and Scarborough with a little "surface unsuitable for road bikes" sign next to each one. They're not making it up either! I don't mind giving the Inferno a jolly good thrashing, and actually quite like the noise that the rear rack makes when the bolts holding it on have sheared and it is bouncing on the rear cassette as I ride along. But the scenery along the Cinder Track is so awesome that it should be open to everyone, form the very young to the very old. You shouldn't need to bring along a fully tooled up mountain bike to get to the end unscathed.

Scarborough Borough Council - which looks after the Cinder Track - is pretty well aware of the problems with the surface of the Track, and went so far as to draw up a report in 2011 setting out the improvements that were needed. The Council knows too that the Track is part of the borough's offer to tourists. It's sad to have to say that the surface of the Track is just as battered now as it was when I first rode it, several years ago.

The move - Part 2

"We could try further out." said Mrs L, after we'd realised that every house we could afford in York was miniature. Or suffered from some other massive disadvantage (toilet in a shed, one bedroom three foot wide but fifteen foot long - that kind of thing).

I booted up a map on Rightmove. "The problem" I opined "is that York is surrounded by this flat, featureless, twenty mile wide Donut of Crapness in every direction. All of these places would rot my soul. What about properly further out? What about Malton?"

"Tories." said Mrs L. "And too horsey."

"You like horses."

"But I don't want to look like one. I'm worried there might be something in the water."

"Hmm."

Some time passed.

"You know, the train from the 'borough's not bad. 45 minutes."

We'd talked about moving to Scarborough before. In fact, we'd talked about it at all levels of seriousness, from actually doing maths to see whether we could afford it, to drunken new-years'-eve wishful thinking, for years. Mrs L grew up there. We both love the legendary North Yorkshire seaside town. If you're unfamilar with it, you might be wondering, "Why?" I'll do my best to explain.

An idiot once rhetorically asked on on internet forum why you would visit Scarborough if you didn't want to visit Cash Convertors or Wetherspoons. Well, you might like surfing, or mountain biking, or sailing. Or Regency architecture. Or Alan Ayckbourn. Or knights and castles. Or fiercely independent businesses. Or the most amazing countryside. Or literally having the muck and tiredness sand blasted off your face by the wind coming off the North Sea.

Scarborough is, in short, amazing. It is not one of those seaside towns which is born out of a resigned reaction to geography ("Oh look, the land stops here and a muddy, freezing sea starts. We'd better build a pier and stuff."). Scarborough is the creation of glaciers and crashing seas, of chilly Romans and Vikings, of castellans and hard as nails fishermen, of Regency dandies and Victorian architects who breathed in the fresh, somehow more filling seaside air and just went slightly crackers.

Travelling over to Scarborough by rail or road is a steadily building assault on your senses. Leaving York behind, you'll drive through that Donut of Crapness I was going on about to Mrs L earlier. There are dealerships selling slightly faded ex-RAC vans. And the Original Factory Shop, with its sign advertising "Coach Parties Welcome!" to a car park so empty as to be sinster. And a curry restaurant, named after notoriously grumpy founding father of Pakistan Muhammad Ali Jinnah.

Then - quite suddenly - the slope of the Howardian Hills rises up in front of you. The  hills are named after the Howard family, who wisely chose them as the location of their slightly over the top country pile. If your're lucky enough to be on the train, you'll be winding your way through Kirkham Gorge, past the ruins of Kirkham Priory. The River Derwent runs beside the railway, having blasted out a twisting path through the hills in the last ice age. Beyond is the Vale of Pickering, a wide, shallow valley with the Yorkshire Wolds rising up on your right and the southern slopes of the North Yorkshire Moors two or three miles away to the left. Suddenly, all the buildings have red pantile roofs and are beautiful. The valley runs all the way to the coast, although it is blocked at its seaward end by a jumble of low hills - essentially rubble dropped by passing glaciers. In the last ice age, the Vale was a huge lake, and the scarps of the Moors and Wolds were its shores.

If you're driving, then you might at this point turn left, and cross the valley floor to Snainton, one of a string of lovely villages sited where the lands starts to rise towards the North Yorkshire Moors. You might not realise it, but you're getting really close to Scarborough now. After Ayton, the road starts to climb the hills, giving you a view rights across the Vale of Pickering to the Wolds.

You really need to be doing this particular bit at sunset. And if possible, in a vehicle with seats set higher than normal.

As you climb the hill towards Jacobs Mount, you might look over to your right. And if the setting sun if just at the right angle, it will be lighting up the hundred metre tall face of Bempton Cliffs, ten or more miles away to the south, turning the mucky white chalk to a glowing rose colour.

Bempton is where the chalk hills of the Wolds dramatically terminate, showing a towering, vertical face to the North Sea. The cliffs march south all the way to Flamborough Head, a huge step in the horizon, bulging past the vertical.

Then, in four or five seconds or less, you'll be over the top of the hill, and Scarborough will be before you - two bays, divided by the castle on its diamond shaped hill. There might be a few street lights shining, and a gathering blue darkness in the hills and woods to you left. And all along the horizon, the sea.

We've been coming to Scarborough regularly for years. But as soon as we started to think seriously about moving here, the tone of the visits changed. Mrs L started to eye up towering Victorian houses in a slightly possessive way. We experienced the magic of driving into Scarborough on a Sunday evening, listening to the rhythmic "Wush...wush...wush..." noise of us passing stationary traffic, queuing the other way, bearing its occupants away from the coast and back to a working week with no prospect of sticking your toes in the sea at all.

"Of course, there's not a hope in hell that I'll be able to get a job over there." I said gloomily, before setting out on my swiftest and most productive job hunt ever.

I started writing this blog so I didn't have to tell Mrs L in quite the exhaustive level of detail I naturally favour about how awesome each of my bike rides has been.

So of course you might guess that I was excited about trying the bike out around Scarborough.

Which is why I bundled the Viscount in the back of the car when I came over for my job interviews, along with my suit and shiny shoes, and jumped straight on it when I got to Scarborough. And I've been doing a bit of exploring, and coming up with a few ideas...

The move - Part 1

If you’ve read the last few posts, you will have noticed that I haven’t said just where the Langsetts have washed up, now that we’ve jumped off the good ship Manchester.

Well, it was very nearly York.

Ah, York. The place where me and Mrs L first met. Like everywhere in the UK at the moment, York is riding the crest of a bicycle filled wave. In some places, that means that two people now cycle instead of one. In York, it means that more or less everyone cycles.

I lived there ten years ago, in a house full of students. In all my circle of friends, I knew three people who rode bikes and another one who sometimes left the "Bikes and bike accessories" pages of the York Press open on the dining room table. It never even crossed my mind to get a bike. Most of the time, I walked. On nights out, my housemates and I would occasionally treat ourselves to a taxi from Fleetways, which would often be a luxurious Mercedes driven by a doleful redundant structural engineer or something similar. These two modes of transport covered all journeys admirably, other than the trek out to that nightclub on the ring road (which required a special bus and a willingness to contemplate a drunken twelve mile walk home).

It’s all changed now.

These days, visiting York is hard work, particularly if (like me) you get a tiny bit excited and / or distracted every time you see someone riding a bike. When we visited to see whether we still liked the city, there were so many bikes being ridden all the time that it was more or less impossible for me to concentrate on anything, because I kept trying to check exactly what sort of bike each passerby was riding and decide whether I approved or not.

It’s in places like York that you can get an inkling of just how significant a major shift to travelling by bike could be. When I drove into the city to pick Mrs L up from her new job, I was pleasantly surprised to find out it actually was possible to drive into town and out again within a reasonable period of time. At rush hour, no less. Ten years ago, this would have resulted in a lot of sitting in traffic, interspersed with desperate lunges forward to try and get through traffic lights before they turned red. On the basis of my extremely unscientific - but nonetheless persuasive – test, either the drivers of York have fallen victim to some sort of mass illness which has left them unable to operate a steering wheel, or the increase in the number of bikes is as a result of a matching reduction in the number of cars.

Mrs L backed this up when she started work, confirming that her office – a recently completed conversion of a Victorian building that is home to 2,000 office workers – has no car park at all.

And it’s not just about the bikes. York is a very lovely place, chock full of interesting stuff left by everyone from the Romans onwards. Our old landlord used to host dinners for the York Georgian Society, meaning there was a very real chance that you would meet gentlemen in knee breeches and powdered wigs emerging from the portico of his home beside the Knavesmire. He had a superb story about meeting the Crown Prince of Jordan. It was that kind of place.

But as much as me and Mrs L loved it, we couldn’t quite bring ourselves to pay what was needed in order to get a house that would fit us and the girls inside it. So we looked a bit further afield

The new commute - Part 2: In which The Langsett's lamentably late looking locates a lovely little line linking home and work...

A few weeks ago I did some low level griping about the high-ish potential for death and serious injury that could be found on my new ride to work.

Since then I have dealt with used cunning and lateral thinking to circumvent the issue. In short, I have been driving to work.

And the drive is pretty good: there is a big motorway passing not far from the fragrant gardens and handsome wrought iron gates of Chateau Langsett, from where it sweeps over the Ship Canal and up the hill past Worsley - creating the formidable barrier which made me grouchy when I tried the ride by bike - through an excitingly curvy junction with another motorway before firing the Polo at surprising velocity into a new NCP multistorey car park next to a handsome Georgian church.

Furthermore, the immense gravitational pull of Manchester city centre sucks virtually all vehicular traffic towards in in the morning, while its gag reflex spits it all back out in the evening. So my side of the motorway is a kind of empty, Robert Moses designed fantasy world of empty tarmac a hundred feet wide, while the other side is crammed full of stationary vehicles of all shapes and sizes.

At times, it feels like I might be building up a considerable store of commuting bad luck which will come crashing down on me at some point in the future.

It has also been making my legs feel weird. Instead of pushing me and my bike to work and back, the right one depresses the accelerator slowly all the way to the floor as I go up the ramp onto the motorway, then presses the brake pedal slowly all the way to the floor when I arrive at the multistorey car park. My left foot taps nervously on bits of interior trim. I am not, in short, getting the same use out of them as I was when I was riding to work, and the result is me jogging up and down stairs at work to get cups of tea and stationary that I don't really need.

I need to sort out a better ride to work, I thought. If only there was some kind of route planning website  - oh! That was easy!

Feeling a bit shamefaced for being so grumpy about cycling provision in Manchester, I realised that by stringing together the rubbish, painted on cycle lanes around the massive shopping centre, the Bridgewater Canal towpath and National Cycle Route 55, I could do almost all of the ride off road. Well, ok, the last bit into Bolton looked a bit flaky. But what would Fred do?

 
He would probably knock out the bricks on one side, hold it up with pit props and then get Mrs Dibnah to set fire to it, creating one of the most awesome spectacles known to man

The biking equivalent of which is trying it out right away. Out came the mighty British Eagle.

Over the miracle motorway...

...and then the Bridgewater Canal takes you to Monton, where you can nip up through this little gate onto NCN Route 55. This stretch of Route 55 runs along an old railway line, first on top of an embankment and then, as the ground rises, through a cutting. It's great: there were fields with cows having an evening snack over to one side, and then the quiet tree lined tunnel of the cutting with families taking an evening walk. There was even...

...a choice of routes. Tyldesley and Leigh are off to the left (I think). Bolton is to the right. The route is all uphill, but it's a nice, constant gradient and easy to steam up at a good speed.

There's a lot going on in this bit of Greater Manchester at the moment, as far as cycling is concerned. Part of the route into Leigh that you can see branching off to the left above is being turned into a guided busway with a traffic free cycle and footpath alongside. Also, Salford City Council have just secured funding to put in a further 1.5 km of traffic free cycle path to provide access to Port Salford, Peel Holdings' enormous distribution estate next to the Ship Canal.

It's not perfect: there are signs telling you where NCN 55 goes all over the show while you're in Salford, but none at all when you cross into Bolton. The other thing that happens in Bolton is that the route suddenly ends in a big clump of buddleia with someone's back garden to one side and a field to the other side. Somewhere close by the was the constant exhale noise of the motorway. A couple of miles zig zagging though random streets was needed at this point, but eventually:

In Bolton, it was very much all going off. Bradshawgate is deathly quiet in the day time, but now it was decorated with the blue flashing lights of a police car. Some ladies were sitting in the highway having a word with the officer while cheery revellers watched from the bars lining the street.

Feeling pretty chuffed with myself, I headed for home, back though the "challenging" bit of the route:

And then back onto the old railway line. It was properly dark now, and it turned out that my little Cateye front light was more for decoration than for actually lighting up the path. A lad in a dark hooded sweater loomed up out of the darkness a yard or two off the starboard bow and then just as quickly vanished behind. Some pale lumps in the path turned out to be another pair of Boltonians, both of whom had had quite a lot of Vimto, sitting on the ground discussing where to go next. Ten more minutes of being utterly terrified that I was going to ride off the side of the embankment, and I popped out of the little gate again back in Monton.

In other bike news, the cycling revolution is pretty much complete. Proof of this came from my brother Matt, a gentleman who routinely spends his Saturdays boiling his back tyres on drag strips up and down the UK.

"I noticed I was turning into a bit of a porker," said Matt, "so I bought a bike."

And this is what he bought:

Oooooooooooooooooooooooooooo yeah.

The realisation that I needed a BMX of my own so that I could pick up from where I left off - that is, jumping off ramps made from an old bit of wood propped up at one end with a brick - came more or less instantly. My own BMX arrived as a Christmas present when I was about 8. It was a chrome Kuwahara Laserlite. Of course I didn't know that at the time. I just knew it wasn't the Raleigh Burner that I secretly coveted. I nearly had a bit of a cry when I realised how much it would cost to go on that nostalgia trip

King (of the Mountain) for a day

I logged on to Strava after tonight's ride - of course, of course - and scrolled through the segments. It looked pretty swift - PB, PB, Second, BIG SHINY GOLD CROWN - Oh my word! My first ever King of the Mountain! I jumped up to go and get a bottle of Unicorn - mmmmm, lovely Unicorn - with a vague idea about checking the entry criteria for next year's Tour de France (looks pretty manageable, I thought). I stopped mid stride, half way across the kitchen.

"There's something not quite right about this sudden display of world beating athletic prowess." I thought to myself.

I went back and double clicked on the segment.Oh dear. First out of four riders. And the segment was created today. And actually it's all downhill. And I think I was trying to sing "14 Years" by Guns N' Roses, after yesterday's rediscovery of the band, while I was riding it. Which I don't think I have ever seen riders in the TdF doing, now I think about it.

I have still been back to look at the shiny gold crown about ten times though.

The Tour de France

You might have been wondering when the Tour would put in an appearance. Well, I'd better own up right now and say that the Langsett household's interaction with The Most Watched Sporting Event in the World was pretty tangential, but enjoyable nonetheless. It went like this:

Thursday 3rd July
"We should go and see the Grand Depart!" said Mrs L, surprisingly. Mrs L does have a bike. It is a Raleigh Pioneer, from the heartbreaking period in Raleigh's history where they had learned to build bikes that were absolutely bulletproof, but sales declined nevertheless. It is The Bike That Will Not Die. For five years, my mum didn't ride it. And during all the time that she didn't ride it, it stood in the back yard of mum and dad's house getting snowed on, baked in the sun, refrigerated, blown over and drenched in rain. I borrowed it for Mrs L to have a go on. It needed a wipe down and some new tyres in order to be ready for the road again. It basically looks like new. Unfortunately Mrs L shows no more respect for the Pioneer's fierce will to survive than my mum did, and it is enjoying a comfortable semi-retirement in the shed outside. So I was, as I say, a bit surprised that she wanted to go and have a look at the Tour, which I imagined would be a bit like being hit around the head with a bicycle while someone bellows the Marseillaise at you, if you don't like cycling. Still, I jumped on Destination Yorkshire's website to have a look at how we might manage it. I wanted to see the peloton climb Holme Moss, the bleak and beautiful Pennine pass between Woodhead and Holmfirth. I had a bit of a moment, and couldn't work out a way to get up to the summit - all the roads seemed to be closed for miles on either side of the route. I thought about trying to explain to my daughters why we were hiking through the Pennines to the top of a windy hill to watch a race pass, when the passing would be over and done with in a few minutes at most. I imagined it raining while I was doing this. I wrote it off.

Saturday 5th July
I honoured the Tour by getting up early and sneaking out of the house for an early morning ride. It had been raining, so I needed mudguards but I was (naturally) feeling all roady, so I took the Sludgy Green Bike rather than the Inferno. The Sludgy Green Bike is a relatively recent arrival in the Langsett bike cave, and it is another Viscount. However, it occupied a less illustrious position in the catalogue than the mighty Aerospace Pro when it was new, and mine is a bit dog eared and tired. In addition it is, as the name suggests, a sludgy green colour. And as you can see, it has all been co-ordinated pretty thoroughly to create a slightly camouflaged effect:

In the right conditions, the Sludgy Green Bike can actually disappear entirely, merging seemlessly with the greenery behind it.

It was a great little ride - out past the paper mill at Carrington with its weird freshly braked bread mixed with sweaty socks smell, up the hill after Oughtrington (with the gradient issuing its customary reminder that a bit more self control when it comes to late night snacks and all-Pasty lunches would be no bad thing) and then right on to the empty A56 and the long run downhill into Lymm. Through the S bend down onto Lymm Dam at a positively conservative 29mph, through Lymm village and then home.

I got back and stuck ITV's wall to wall coverage of Stage 1 on. Kate looked at me askance, while I excitedly rattled off a series of unrelated Tour facts, the closest I could come to actual conversation.

" Look, there's Ned Boulting!" I said excitedly, bouncing up and down a bit. I read Ned's book about the Tour de France earlier this year and it was nice to see him doing his day job.

"Daddy, why do you like bike races so much..." said Kate in a pitying tone of voice.

We were in and out for the rest of the day, so I caught bits of the coverage. I heard about how the stage ended, but I didn't see it.

Sunday 6th July

The Bike that Will Not Die's former owner came over in the middle of the day to visit my uncle in hospital, and I had a secret mission to a classified location in North Yorkshire to complete later that afternoon, in connection with Mrs Langsett's new job. The Tour was impossible to avoid completely. It was on whenever the television was on. My uncle lives up the hill from Langsett, and my aunt described seeing the peloton coming down to the hill before taking on the Cote de Midhopestones when we spoke to her from the hospital. Later on, when I set off for North Yorkshire, the westbound lane of the M62 was full of cars with bikes on the roof or hanging off the back - more than I'd ever seen before - all returning from watching the Tour. Crossing over the stage route outside Huddersfield, there was a brief glimpse of blue lights and the debris that was the race's aftermath being scrupulously collected.

Checking Facebook later, it seemed that everyone in the world had managed to catch the race. Helen and Martin had made it to Holme Moss with their lads, as had Kate and Rick. The sun had shone, and this bald hilltop between Manchester and Sheffield looked thoroughly tamed, with thousands of people (accompanied by thousands of bikes) spread out along the final few hairpins to watch Blel Kadri storm the last ramp before the summit.

Monday 7th July
I got to work on my TdF television coverage backlog, watching the bits of stage 1 that I'd missed. The speed that Yorkshire whipped by at was eye opening. Familiar landmarks and places that we've been meaning to visit for years tripped by in turn as the peloton rolled onwards, until it felt like there wasn't a bit of the county that I'd seen where the TdF hadn't also swooped past. There was that side road on the way to Malham where Mrs Langsett demanded a comfort break, only to be surprised by a farmer on his tractor! There was the bit on the Harrogate road where, in the minibus on the way back from Kate and Rick's wedding, I'd realised that getting stuck into the chocolate fountain was going to have toilet consequences! And then there was that stage finish....


I haven't watched that much cycle racing. So the way in which the peloton sorted and distilled itself as the last few kilometres wound down was like a magic trick done in plain sight. One minute, there was a huge, chaotic, multicoloured group of riders rolling along in a way that looked almost relaxed. The next minute, the speed was up, and the group had separated into neat little lines formed of the riders of each team, each working to move their sprinter into the best position.  Mark Cavendish's Omega Pharma-Quick Step team in their black and white jerseys came hammering down the right hand side; Cavendish was tucked away third from the front. I instinctively wanted to duck out of the way. The Katusha team jinked and swerved to the left, trying to find a way through but had nothing. They were coming up on the last kilometre. I knew what would happen next. Those first two Omega Pharma riders would fall away. Cavendish would engage warp drive, treating the whole peloton like his own personal launch pad. The background would blur. The Manx lad would scream across the line and punch the air. Except nobody had told Cancellara that: he put the hammer down over on the other side of the road, racing ahead of the pack so fast he looked like he was leaving his bike behind. Omoega Pharma's hold on the front broke. I lost Cavendish and only saw him again when the crash happened, Simon Gerrans' bike going under his front wheel. Mark of course, was trying to find a gap to get himself back to the front.

Here's the thing: I knew the end result before I sat down to watch. But it was still the most exciting bit of televised sport I've ever watched. It was just incredible watching the peloton form up for the sprint, and just as incredible seeing it suddenly come unstuck.

Like I said - tangential, but enjoyable.

Death Fork Rally

I'm writing this, of course, in the euphoric aftermath of the Tour de France bobbing and weaving though the hills that are the heart of my bit of England. Superb as it was, it doesn't overshadow the mighty lane conquering bike behemoth that was the Second Annual Death Fork Rally. But before we get to that, you might be thinking to yourself, why "Death Fork"?

Well, there's a story there of course.

The Death Fork Rally is for Viscounts, like my blue and silver Aerospace Pro. The first generation of Aerospaces were built with a fork made out of a very beautiful bare aluminium casting, joined to a steel stearer tube. The persistent rumour that follows this design of fork is that the aluminium casting can separate from the steel steerer tube. If you tap "Viscount" and "Death Fork" into Google, you don't have to go very far before you come across stuff like this, from bicycling legend Sheldon Brown.

"UNDER NO CIRCUMSTANCES SHOULD A LAMBERT OR VISCOUNT BE RIDDEN WITH THE ORIGINAL CAST ALUMINIUM FORK!!!!!!!!!"

There was a recall of Aerospaces in the US too.

Which all sounds a bit scary. doesn't it?

Fortunately, Viscounts have a quietly spoken hero on their side. His name is Steve, and he lives an hour or so up the A6 from me. Steve loves his Viscounts, and when faced with this death fork legend, he dealt with it in the best possible way: he found and spoke to the people that made these bikes back in the seventies. There were, in short, three versions of the aluminium fork and the last version (which is the version fitted to my bike) has no recorded failures.

Still, that recall notice and Sheldon's stern warning add a certain something to the time I spend with the Aerospace. Just occasionally, when I'm on a fast descent, I'll sneak a look at the fork flexing and moving to take up all the bumps in the road and wonder about whether it and I understand each other's requirements...

So that's why its called the Death Fork Rally. Jem did the organising this year, and sorted out a brilliant route through the beautiful countryside to the north of Burton-on-Trent.This turned out to be a land of steep little hills, oak woods and villages built out of warm red brick. In the middle of the ride was a very good pub, and at the end was another one along with tea and bacon butties courtesy of Mrs Jem. My day pass from Mrs Langsett expired at about tea time, but I left behind a campsite full of Viscount owners planning their second pub mission of the day.

Stella brought her top secret, newly restored pink "Viscountess"; John rode his incredible 24 karat gold plated Lambert; and Whippet's essentially brand new, ruby red Aerospace Sport proved once and for all that if you make your bike clean enough it will eventually become so clean that dirt just slides right off it. There were plenty of other beautiful bikes there, but also a brilliant, kind and warm hearted group of people riding them.

Here are a few pictures from the day:

Team photo. Keen eyed readers will spot The Langsett's confused pairing of shorts with long sleeved top. The weather hadn't made up its mind yet and neither had I.

John and Rhona, quite possibly thanking their lucky stars that the sun wasn't bright enough to light up John's golden Lambert.

Whippet's beautiful, better than new Aerospace Sport, set up for time trialling: the cogs on the back wheel ready to provide five slightly different sorts of pain and suffering to the rider.

Rhona and Stella's bikes having a rest before the off.

Jem and his world tour ready Deore 18AX.

Thirsty Viscount owners being attracted by the gravitational pull of the pub, Timothy Taylors' Landlord and lovely, just made pizzas.

The Aerospace getting its post ride wash.

Death Fork Rally: Countdown

A warm and friendly welcome to all my new readers from Russia looking for big, sturdy pants. There's only one week to go until the second Death Fork Rally. Which means it's probably time I put the wheels back on my silver and blue speed machine...

With thanks to Jem's son for the great posters.

Incontinence supplies at internet prices

It's all change in the Langsett household. I've landed myself a new job; although Mrs L quickly out-newjobbed me by also getting not just a new job, but one in an entirely different bit of the country. In the meantime, there's a new commute to get to grips with. The old commute is pretty good, too. It starts in one Manchester suburb and ends in another one, but in between there's quite a lot of this:

So the new ride to work has quite a lot to live up to.

Let's get down to the nuts and bolts. My destination is a place where this man is rightly revered as a god:

A place where, if the massive piece of machinery behind Fred is anything to go by, the entire town centre is powered by steam. A place where there are whole mirror glass fronted shops entirely devoted to the sale of Quality Meats:

I tried the route out on my Claud Butler first thing on Sunday morning, which is where the photos came from. But I first rode it at night, a few of weeks ago. And it gave me the creeping horrors.

For the most part, I notice the dodgy bits of riding on the road for only as long as it takes for them to happen. Someone overtakes you with a couple of inches to spare. But a couple of seconds later, they're gone, and you're still getting lungfuls of fresh air and the sun on your face. If I do stop to think about making roads safer for lads and ladies on bikes, my big plan starts and ends with fitting uncannily accurate rocket launchers, like on Chuck Norris's bike in Delta Force to all bikes.


This ride was different though. It was cool and late when I set out. There was barely anything on the road, apart from me. And the absence of cars, buses and trucks made it easier to appreciate what a pig of a route this is. It is structurally unsafe.

The first big obstacle is a monster, out of town shopping centre. It should be easy to get past on a bike, because there are bike paths all around it. But they're the kind of bike paths that consist of red paint on the pavement. I might be doing the designers an injustice by saying that the paint has been splashed down at random without any thought about where each path is trying to get people to, but that is exactly the impression that's been created. A couple of years ago, a young woman from my part of Manchester, Georgia Flynn, was knocked down and killed trying to figure out her way to work at the shopping centre on her bike.

I carried on, over the Ship Canal and up the hill towards Worsley. The next obstacle was a motorway junction. There's a steep uphill gradient in the mix here, so there is absolutely no chance that you'll be travelling anywhere near the speed of the cars that come belting down the slip road from the motorway. There are no crossings or traffic signals to make it easier for you. If you're on a bike- or on foot for that matter - the motorway might as well be a wall.

In Walkden, there was a particularly evil one way system - one of those which maroons a whole town centre in the middle of a constant, revolving wall of traffic. It was late on a Tuesday evening, so the roads were really quiet. But you could imagine the roaring, swirling maelstrom of vehicular death that it would be at 8:07 on a Tuesday morning, where the weekend might as well be located in another plane of existence. And in case you can't imagine it, I found this short film of it on the t'internet.

Finally, there was this terrifying invitation from Bolton Council to maroon yourself between two merging streams of high speed traffic waiting for - hell to freeze over? I dunno. Clearly there's no realistic way of getting across the slip road without a lot of sweaty palmed stumbling over your own bike.

But then there was this very direct bit of advertising, which lifted the mood a bit:

Greater Manchester has just won £20 million to improve cycling provision in the city - the website setting out the plan for spending that cash is here. Let's get involved in a bit of internet activism: if you're reading this, and you live in Greater Manchester, and you've ever found yourself thinking - as I did at that junction in Bolton - that the road designer must want you personally and thoroughly dead, then get in touch with the people holding the purse strings and tell them where the money needs to be spent

This new commute of mine is not all bad. As you're coming over the top of the hill to Bolton, you get this lovely teaser view of the town hall clock tower with Winter Hill rising behind. I would love to ride up here when there's snow on the top - I bet it looks beautiful.

Coming back down the hill towards home, there's Worsley Delph - two hundred yards and a world away from the motorway, with the half timbered Packet House hidden amongst the trees.

And that's why some thought and money needs spending on cycling provision in this bit of town. This could be a great way to get to and from work. But at the moment it feels a bit too much like an audition for a part in Casualty.

Death Fork Rally

Lock your door. Board your windows. Deathfork II is nearly here...

Bike building

A bit of sanding, polishing and painting has been taking place recently at Langsett Towers, and the result looks like this:

This old Carlton was made in Worksop, one of the unlikely stars in the bike building universe. It is a bike which I very definitely Should Not Have Bought. Carlton spent years building incredible, dazzling bikes painted the most amazing colours which must have looked all the more incredible in post war Britain, a country which The Langsett (Sr) tells me was actually beige. Pop your sunglasses on and have a look at the beautiful Carltons on Classic Lightweights and you'll see what I mean.

Then, towards the back end of the 1970's, Carlton produced the charmless, pillarbox red Grand Prix and garnished it with some dodgy, faux Art Deco decals. My own particular Grand Prix came from a beautiful bit of Shropshire, tucked away behind Birmingham. It had had every possible kind of abuse inflicted on it. As a result it was a scratched, faded pink, rusty, bent, battered cycling disaster area. I responded to its terrifying air of neglect by hiding it in the back of the cellar.

Eventually I buckled down to the job of getting it working and looking a bit better again.

Then I stopped. Then I started - and then stopped - again. In fact, totting it up on my fingers, I think I did this for about three years. Until last night, when I stood back and realised the Carlton was a working bike again.

Even with a new coat of paint, the Carlton's no racing rarity. But seeing it in the evening sunlight reminded me that even humble bikes have their moments.