Pendle Witches - the trial

Outside the pub, Sean's immaculate TI-Raleigh was leaning against a wall, gleaming red, yellow and black in the watery sunshine. Someone had kindly pinned a gradient profile for the route up on the door - it looked like a particularly vicious set of shark's teeth. There was a massive point somewhere near the middle - Waddington Fell. This had utterly humbled me two years before. I ended up walking up the thing in the rain and the fog, thinking I'd reached the top three times but each time finding more hill beyond the false summit. Still, at least I could see why my legs had thrown the towel in.

Inside the pub, there was a fire going, vintage bikes on display and free brews getting handed out. But it was nearly time for the off, so I went outside and lined up the Aerospace with a pride of beautiful vintage bikes. There was Mark's Daccordi, a spotless Hetchins in black and red, and a couple of burgundy Carltons. Lightweight British bikes are often covered in the heraldry and gothic detailing of the middle ages, so we looked a little like a bunch of knights getting ready for a cavalry charge.

Not all of the townsfolk of Rawtenstall were pleased to see this beautiful collection of classic machinery. While we were lining up, a Nissan Micra pulled to a halt. The window rolled down, and a visible fog of Lynx Africa wafted out. One spark would have seen the whole lot engulfed in a massive fireball.

"Is there a bike race today?" asked the panicked, but extremely well deodorised lad driving. I said that there was. "Are they closing the roads? Only I'm moving house!" I assured the gentlemen that the highway would remain open, and returned to my pre-ride prep of noting everyone else's sensibly sized chainrings.

There was a lad on the PA system giving a blow by blow account of the route; the only words that lodged were "tailwind to help you up the last hill..." I'll have that! I thought, losing myself in a sunny daydream of being gently wafted up the last hill before the finish. Then it was time to go.

The cruel, energy sapping evil of the route comes from that gradient profile. Even while you're steaming up the first hill out of Rawtenstall, feeling a hundred feet tall and like you have literally had all of your Weetabix, the gradient is taxing your muscles and stealing calories which you will need later on. I got a bit carried away and tried a bit of a break away, getting wound in about ten seconds later by a group lead by Daniel and Zena on the Hetchins and a lovely blue Roberts. We summited - and there was a miniature Burnley and Padiham down at the bottom of the valley, backed by green and brown hills.

(Childzy's picture of Burnley from Wikipedia)

This is the good bit: I got my head down and shoved the gear lever forward, listening to the "...clatter bang! clatter bang!" of the chain jumping all the way over to the fast cog. I booted the Viscount up to 35 - 40 mph and screamed down the hill. It was still early, and the roads were totally clear. We raced through Padiham and climbed out of the valley. This was steeper than the first climb, and I had the Viscount in the lowest gear all the way up.

Cresting the top of the hill gives you your first view of the Nick O'Pendle. This brutal hill climb looks like a grey stripe painted up a green wall. Looking at it from across the valley, there is no indication that it is anything other than vertical. The sun was out, and it all looked glorious. Hard on the brakes, all the way down the hill into the tiny village of Sabden, a place presumably entirely inhabited by people who enjoy witnessing human suffering close up.

Chris Boardman has an absurd course record for climbing the Nick O'Pendle in about ten seconds flat. And that included a short break near the top to plan his excellent, world conquering range of bikes. I gave it my best shot. I hammered across the bridge at Sabden at full chat, and then starting to work down through the gears, ending up on the big ring at the back frighteningly quickly. Steve Ransom steamed past, winding his Thorn up the hill as if gravity did not apply. "Fair play pushing those gears." he said, giving me a good wide berth in case the insanity was contagious.

I realised I was actually slightly scared of the Nick. It was demanding a level of physical effort which I just wasn't comfortable giving. It looked more massive this year in the sun than it had a couple of years previously, when the mist had at least hidden the top. Jonathan passed me on his sparkling red, turquoise and chrome Eddy Merckx  He'd said a little while earlier that he'd put some effort into training this year, and it looked like it had paid off handsomely.

The hill won. I got off before the cattle grid and walked for a couple of hundred yards. Last time, I'd taken my time over eating a Boost, as though the middle of this vertical incline had just struck me as being the best place to enjoy a bit of glucose. I hopped back on and gave the pedal an exploratory push. It turned! Magically, my legs both reported for duty and I got the Viscount moving again. Photographic evidence suggests that I managed a ghastly, re-animated corpse style smile as I passed Rick Robson, the event photographer, towards the top of the climb.

Once you've wrestled the Nick into submission, you really do have a day pass into heaven. The middle bit of this ride is just beautiful, treating you to brief views of perfect villages, church bells ringing, the smell of bacon frying. The sun was sticking with us, and the leaves on the conker trees were the most incredible green colour. Coming up Waddington Fell, there was even some cowbell. The halfway point is at Dunsop Bridge, where there is a very good chance that HRH the Queen is the postmistress. Here there were tables creaking under the weight of homemade cakes, boxes of bananas and gallons of water to refuel us all.

For me, the ride back down was tough going. There is a long, steady climb out of Whalley, but my legs had started to cramp before we even got that far. Rain came on as I started the climb, and the wind got up too. I was waiting, of course, for it to turn into the tailwind that we'd been promised at the start, but it kept on stubbornly boxing me in the face and around the ears as I rode through Blackburn and tried to get some steam up for the last big climb, up to Haslingden. This was sheer torture. It felt like I would have been faster if I'd got off and walked, and I had to have an argument with myself before committing the effort required for each pedal stroke. My speed readout on Strava is a crazy little zig zag, dependent entirely on what the wind was doing and how steep the hill was. I had the Arctic Monkeys on my walkman and tried keeping time to the music. And then, almost before I realised it, the last descent into Rawtenstall was in front of me, and I'd done it. Paul and Sarah - who'd just done the short route on their Carlton Corsair and Raleigh Candice - gave me a finish line interview before I staggered into the warmth of the pub to tuck into the pie and peas.

Pendle Witches

Of course, if you read the last post, you'll know that I am a bit in love with the Pendle Witches Vintage Velo. Last year it took place a couple of weeks after my youngest daughter was born, so I skipped it. I was late getting my entrance form in this year, even though I very much wanted to do it again. So I had a few weeks of fretting before I got a phone call from the incredibly modest and down to earth organiser, Sean McAdam, to let me know that I had forgotten to sign my cheque, but not to worry, because he does that sort of thing all the time too. Sean works in a bike shop a few miles from me, so I called in when I was doing my Christmas shopping to turn the cheque into a valid means of paying the entrance fee. Between then and race day, I spent a lot of time anticipating. And when I say anticipating, I mean either:

- Making plans to modify my bike to give me a hope of hell in getting up the hills; or

- Making plans to implement an epic, pro standard training regime, to give me a hope in hell of getting up the hills; or

- Imagining myself sprinting across the finishing line to the cheers of thousands and immediately having a massive bottle of champagne thrust into my hands. Possibly some sort of complimentary "sports massage" might happen shortly afterwards.

(Ken Johnson's picture of Eddy Merckx doing his thing in Montreal - 1974 - hosted on Flickr)

None of these things actually happened, but although all three turned out to be wild fantasies which I definitely should not be publishing on the internet, they weren't entirely without merit. For instance, that first idea of doing the ride on a bike which is fit for the job: Modern bikes are welcome on the ride, but vintage bikes and the people who are prepared to try and ride them up some of the fiercest gradients in the North of England are part of what makes the Pendle Witches special. Which suits me just fine, as I have three bikes in the cellar that are older than me. Of those three bikes, one of them has only five gears. On a bike, gears work a lot like they do in a car: the lowest gear is the one where the engine turns over the most umber of times during one turn of the road wheels. It is the gear where the engine is strongest, the one that you use for starting and for climbing massive hills. My first bike is extremely flattering to ride - it always feels lighter than it is, and it is always egging you on and telling you to go a bit faster or ride a bit further. It is also an astounding, lit-from-within orange colour:

But the Pendle Witches is a serious morning's work, and none of the five gears on my first bike are low enough to get me up the hills.

My second bike has more gears - 12 of them in fact - but I am half way through trying to build a new rear wheel for it at the moment. Also, it is heavy and incredibly uncomfortable to ride. Going over a pothole on it is similar to what I imagine being set about by some sort of Chuck Norris style martial arts expert with a nasty glint in his eye might feel like. So that was my second bike ruled out.

My third bike is the Aerospace Pro. I knew without thinking about it very hard that this was the bike to ride the Pendle Witches on. It is a working class hero for one thing: built in Birmingham and sold for peanuts, it was in its day a featherweight miracle, as light and as fast as bikes costing many times more. It is comfortable and fluid to ride, regardless of what the road surface is like. And like all heroes, it has one fatal flaw: the front fork - that's the bit that holds the front wheel and connects it to the frame and handlebars - is made of an aluminium casting joined to a steel tube. The rumour that has followed the Aerospace almost since it was born is that the casting and tube have a habit of separating from each other.

However, I must have ridden hundreds of miles on the Aerospace since I finished putting it back together, and over that time I have come to trust the bike in a way which demonstrates a fundamental lack of understanding on my part of the way that metal fatigue occurs. So, the Aerospace got the job - again.

There was just one problem. While the Aerospace's designers created a fine, beautifully engineered bike, they sort of did so on the assumption that anyone wishing to ride it up hills would first go out and get some legs like Sir Chris Hoy's. On a geared bike, the bigger the biggest cog attached to the back wheel is, the easier going up hills will be. The smaller the smallest cog attached to the pedals is, the easier going up hills will be. On the Aerospace, the smallest cog at the front has 42 teeth, and the biggest at the back has 25. What this adds up to in practical terms is an invitation from the designers to get involved in some Spartan style training or suffer. Although I did spend an hour the day before the race trying to find a bigger cog to go on the back, ultimately I chose the latter option.

I couldn't sleep the night before the ride. I tinkered with the bike before bed time, and I was up and away early. The Pendle Witches starts from the Craven Heifer in Rawtenstall, and I got there before the weather had decided whether it was going yo be cruel or kind.

To be continued.

Cycling: it's time to come clean

And there's a lot to confess. It's going to take some time. So I'll start off with a picture:

That's my bike! It's a 1974 Viscount Aerospace Pro, a beautiful thing which shares its creation myth with the Advanced Passenger Train and the TSR-2 - talented aerospace engineers put energy into doomed later flowering of British industrial prowess, since forgotten by nearly everyone. Actually, I think I might have made up the Viscount's inclusion in that myth myself. But it kind of fits.

We have done some amazing things together. That bike gave me my first, genuine, entirely-cycling-fuelled
moment of euphoria.  I was half an hour into the Pendle Witches Vintage Velo ride a couple of years ago, and along with a couple of hundred other riders, I'd climbed out of the Irwell Valley to the hills above Padiham and Burnley. The sun came out, and half of Lancashire was spread out in front of me, with the road down into the valley twisting and turning nicely. "Oh yes!" I thought, instantly ruling myself out from any future competition to find the next Poet Laureate.

An amount of acceptance of the effects of gravity was required, along with a high degree of faith in the forty year old bike I was sitting on. A bike which had until 12 months previously, been in bits in a box in a Brummie bloke's garage. I stuck my head down, tucked my elbows in and dialled in some more speed as gravity took over. Smashing down  the hill with a sonic boom rattling the windows of the houses is probably one of the finest things I have ever experienced, or ever will experience. There is something magical about how little stuff there is on a bike. It heightens the illusion that it's just you that is racing down a hill at forty five miles per hour; that you have been endowed with modestly superhuman powers for a short while.

That picture above was taken on January 1st 2013, and I can vividly remember the screaming red wine hangover which I had at the time. It's a measure of how much I love being on the bike that when I rolled out of bed that morning, I somehow landed in the saddle.

Pride and Prejudice

The Langsett family had Radio 4's Pride and Prejudice adaptation on, on the way to the seaside a few weeks back. I was being a bit grumpy about it, but in all honesty I love Pride and Prejudice as much as everyone else does, and it was a genuine pleasure to have another version of it to enjoy. Particularly as I could do so even though I was in the fast lane on the A64 at the time. Also, it reminded me pleasantly about my Christmas time Austen overdose. Let me explain...

The Langsett spent three exceptionally happy evenings over the Christmas period experimenting with my new Martini fixation, surrounded by mince pie crumbs and most importantly, watching the superb Death Comes To Pemberley on the Beeb. I had unknowingly been setting myself up for this thrilling and totally unexpected three day Austen themed treat for months, starting in the autumn when Mrs Langsett met Jo Baker, the author of Longbourn, at a bookshop signing evening. It's been a few years since I last read any Austen books, so I steamed through this lovingly crafted retelling of Pride and Prejudice from the servants' perspective.

Then, I looked around for some more slightly oblique ways of enjoying Austen, and -courtesy of the surprisingly large band of Spanish Colin Firth fans willing to take the time to post chunks of it on Youtube - managed to watch the whole of the Beeb's 1995 adaptation of Pride and Prejudice. The picture quality was awful, but of course it didn't matter a bit - I could still hear the words, and they were brilliant. I loved it all, but there were a few bits that I particularly enjoyed. If you can spare me a minute, I'll just mention one:

That's Lizzie of course, taking a turn about the garden with her fantastically caddish and rascally brother in law who, in spite of having been lately discovered living in sin in London, is still having a go at spinning the hard luck story that Darcy deprived him of a living as a clergyman.

Lizzie responds by deftly warning Wickham off, suggesting Darcy's younger sister will turn out well as she is "...over the most trying age." She's referring to Wickham having tried to talk Georgiana into eloping, and also to how young her own sister - Wickham's wife - is. But that's not quite enough to get Wickham back in line, so she gives him both barrels, conversationally speaking: letting him say how much he wanted to be a clergyman and then setting out what actually happened. And then, while Wickham is still flapping about and wondering what has just happened, sweetly extending her hand for him to kiss and popping inside.

There is a real beauty to the way in which the two characters interact. Wickham, unable to stop himself from lying in order to make himself look wholesome, and Elizabeth meeting his behaviour with an incremental, exquisitely measured reveal: she knows it all, and he can't pull the wool over her eyes any longer. It's a tiny, brief scene, but the emotional payback that comes from reading or watching it is enormous. That's something to do, I think, with how measured and intelligent Elizabeth's response is. The fact that it's a private exchange between the two of them is important too. It's a reminder that no audience is required for the nature of a relationship to completely change.

The best thing of all though is that this is pretty much how it happens in the book. Two hundred years ago, Austen put together this beautiful little scene. There is no exposition, so you can just get on with enjoying these two characters jump off the page - or screen.

The Right Honourable member for Tatton

I was probably never going to like George Osborne that much. I'm from the North and I'm a bit leftie. Osborne, as you probably know, swims every morning in a Scrooge McDuck style money bin before spending half an hour thinking up ways to further impoverish the already impoverished.  There are, weirdly, some areas of overlap in the Langsett - Osborne personal Venn diagram - same university and degree - but I think that's where the similarities stop, thank God. For Osborne has always seemed to be the worst kind of Tory, combining an unfeasible number of characteristics that have generally been viewed as bad news for centuries. For example; the economy's picked up a bit of late. Boethius would have regarded this as the wheel turning. Personally, I like the idea of millions of people's collective attempts to make things better bearing fruit. George Osborne, on the other hand - well, let's see what he thinks:

"By avoiding quick fixes and easy options, we're delivering economic security for the hard working people of this country."

In other words, he thinks that he sorted the economy out. Let's expand on that a bit more. He thinks that the fact that people suffered as a result of his inaction is evidence that he can use to back up the assertion that he sorted the economy out. He thinks that the fact that the the recovery is the slowest in a hundred years is also evidence that he can use to back up his assertion that he sorted the economy out. The truth is that you or I probably had more to do with the economic recovery than Osborne did. You might have worked harder, for less money, in order to keep the customers you have. Maybe you spent what money you had where you thought it might do the most good. Perhaps you invested in your business to preserve capability for the day when the economy started to come good. These are all things that Osborne could have done too, but chose not to.

Last week, Osborne was giving his views on reforming the EU - suggesting that Europe was falling behind Asian economies like India and China, and that only the Tories could reform the EU and save it from economic irrelevancy.

"We knew that there was a competitveness problem in Europe before the crisis...The hard truth is that if we want to maintain our way of life in Europe, we've got to be more competitive. And that's going to require some tough steps: living within our means, making our labour markets competitive, expanding free trade."

Being honest, this stuff sends a shiver of utter terror down my spine. It marks Osborne out as one of a tiny band of people whose job is secure enough to think that letting the waves of globalisation wash over us will be in some way a heartening, manly experience that enriches us all. I hope I am not fooling myself when I say that people from my bit of the UK generally have a different perspective. Successive waves of glaobalisation have stripped whole industries from the North, wasting expertise and skill along the way. Assuming Osborne is correct to suggest that the EU is on a course which will make the welfare state unaffordable. Is he really suggesting that it might be possible to create a level playing field by stripping away employment rights?

Let's think about what China is for a moment: a country with more or less unlimited natural and intellectual resources. A country which has welded the personal repression of the worst Communist regimes to economic freedom for corporate bodies. There is no scenario in which tinkering with European labour laws will do anything other than gratify Osborne's own instinct to make life worse for anyone poorer than he is.

Chinese labour laws on the other hand, are a different matter. The UK government is falling over itself to create trade links with China at the moment. Wouldn't it be worth including a delegation from the TUC on the next UK trade mission? Because the challenge here is to help China become an industrialised nation without doing unacceptable damage to the fabric of states that have already undergone that process. And the key to that is surely to raise the expectations of people in China, rather than ruining those of people here.

Spitfire

I have been very much enjoying Jeffrey Quill's book "Spitfire" for the last week or so.

On the face of it, it's his autobiography, telling the story of his career as a test pilot and its intersection with the second world war. But its also the story if his relationship with the Spitfire. Without being overly sentimental or deliberately anthropomorphising the aircraft, it is a character in his story that is every bit as important as he is. The relationship has characteristics of marriage and parenthood: on the one hand, he's aware of the outstanding characteristics that the aircraft was created with, but on the other hand it was his job to bring the Spitfire on, to develop and look after it, making sure that it stayed at the cutting edge for as long as possible.

Shall we have a look at what Jeffrey's job was like?

OK then. Here you go:

http://youtu.be/RW2_xrMsYTM

That's a little bit of Leslie Howard's 1942 film, "The First of the Few", which tells the story of the Spitfire's birth and of its designer, R.J. Mitchell. And how good is the music? It's William Walton's Spitfire Prelude and Fugue. Sid Cole, supervising editor of "The First of the Few" told this lovely story about the writing of the piece: "Leslie Howard, for some reason, could not be at the running of the film for Walton so he told me very elaborately what he wanted from the music. So after we had the viewing I went up to Walton and repeated what Leslie had said as accurately as I could. Walton listened very carefully and said 'Oh I see, Leslie wants a lot of notes', and he went away and wrote The Spitfire Fugue". 

As an aside, the Spitfire Prelude and Fugue is an example of my huge weakness for Displays of Extreme Competency. I love watching scenes of tremendous activity, where everyone involved knows his or her role inside out and is working away with incredible speed and precision. On the other hand, when I'm in similar situations myself, I wear a permanent frown and my mind's eye is completely filled with images of threads unravelling, trains derailling and buildings toppling over. For example: I was out doing some Christmas shopping. Because I am a chap, the date on which the Christmas shopping was taking place was 21st December, and I had concerns about the success of the endeavour. "I'll have a bit of music." I thought, pushing random buttons on the radio in my small black Volkswagen. The Spitfire Prelude and Fugue came on. Immediately, my heart lifted, and I skillfully guided the VW towards the shops with a renewed sense of purpose. When I came home, I thought I'd done a cracking job; but a sober assessment of my haul by Mrs Langsett revealed that I had, in fact, just confused the incredibly potent impression of Extreme Competency that this brilliant piece of music conjures up, with the real thing. Anyway, back to the film clip...

That's David Niven of course, turning his "off"s into "Orrrrf"s - but he's playing a character based partly on Jeffrey Quill. And the pilot flying the Spitfire? Well, that really is Jeffrey Quill, taking a break from his day job as test pilot to help turn the Spitfire into myth.

There is a lot that I love about "Spitfire". I particularly enjoyed remembering - as I have done every so often while I've been reading it - that it was Jeffrey Quill's job to get up, go out and do this stuff; that a large and well organised company was prepared to pay him a decent wage to go howling around in aeroplanes. I'm writing this on Monday evening, and I think I'll finish be including an account of one of Mr Quill's Mondays in 1937. It's quite long, but stick with it, because there is probably no better description of how to handle difficult situations at work:

" I had established a routine with the Wellesley flight test schedule. When I had completed the level speed run at 12,000 ft I closed the throttle and pulled the nose up and wound the trimmer back, allowing the aircraft to climb upwards, decelerating towards the stall. I took my hands off the controls and wrote the figures from the level speed run on my knee pad. I then waited until the aircraft stalled completely, still hands off, and wrote down the indicated stalling speed... All the massive amount of testing I had done on the prototype's handling at the stall and in stalled manoeuvres had given me the utmost confidence in the Wellesley's ladylike behaviour. Perhaps I was overconfident, for while the aircraft was wallowing about at 12,000 ft and I was scribbling on my knee pad, waiting for the nose to drop and pick up speed, she suddenly lurched into a right hand spin. I was taken completely by surprise for the Wellesley had never shown the slightest tendency to do this before. I immediately took recovery action but it was to no avail. In the course of the first turn and a half the nose was well down and then suddenly it reared up and the spin became very flat, slow and stately. There was no response to normal recovery action and I tried to think of all the other things I should try. I started by trying full power and all that did was to flatten the spin still further, and speed it up, so I took the power off again. Then I tried lowering the wheel hoping that would affect the centre of gravity in some magical way, and then tried rocking the elevator throughout its full range, and finally lowering the flaps. I then remembered that in such circumstances it was quite common for pilots to try all sorts of recovery actions but never give any of them enough time to work before trying something else so I looked over the side to see how much height I still had and started trying things all over again in an agonisingly slow and deliberate manner, ordering myself to keep calm and not to panic.

The Wellesley treated everything I did with a scornful disdain and continued solemnly spinning, down and down. Somewhere around 3,000 ft I decided I would have to go... I opened the canopy and crouched on the seat, grasping the windscreen. The cockpit of the Wellesley was forward of the wing and I looked at the big metal bladed propeller windmilling round very close in front of me. In theory when I let go I should go out backwards ad sideways but I was forward of the centre of gravity and had a nasty feeling that I was going to go forwards through that slicing propeller. But there was nothing I could do about it, so I cut the ignition switches and hoped for the best. I went over the port side, hit my head on some object unknown - perhaps the tail wheel assembly - delayed a little bit and pulled the rip cord...I immediately heard a strange swooshing noise as the Wellesley spun down past me, much too close for comfort...

I was then able to watch the Wellesley from above as it descended to the ground. We were in an area of New Malden and there were built up areas interspersed with areas of open country. It was about 7pm on a fine summer's evening. I became very anxious about the Wellesley crashing in a built-up area and causing loss of life, but I could not tell when it was going to hit. Then it stopped abruptly and disintegrated. It had hit a house but, thank God, there was no explosion or fire. Then, apparently several seconds later, I heard the dull 'crump' of the impact. I could hear every sound coming from the ground as I floated silently downwards on that balmy summer's evening - dogs barking, the traffic moving along the Kingston bypass an then gradually the build-up of the municipal 'flap' caused by this large aircraft crashing in a suburban street. A maroon went off in the fire station quickly followed by the clanging of the fire engine's bell. I looked down and spotted the fire engine trying to get to the scene of the crash and taking a number of wrong turnings on the way and I considered shouting some directions to it from on high.. Then suddenly I was getting close and I could see roughly where I was likely to land; there were houses and gardens and trees and every garden seemed to have a large and uninviting glass greenhouse. I descended into the base of a small fir tree which broke my fall and so it was a comfortable landing...A small knot of people came running up, having invaded the large and pleasant garden in which I had landed, It was the property of a Major Petrie who turned out to be a member of the Brooklands Flying Club. He, his wife and some friends were drinking an evening cocktail when through the window they saw a strange band of people running up the drive, heads directed skywards. They came out int time to see me being helped out of the bottom of the fir tree and disentangled from the parachute. Within a surprisingly short time I had a large whiskey in my hand and was on the telephone to the police and received the blessed news that no one had been injured in the crash."

Happy Monday!

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Have a read though this  perfect short story, written by acerbic genius New Yorker Rebecca Schiff, a woman whose fire escape I am proud to have briefly sat on. No really! It was one of those ornate cast iron things...