CHANGING THE RHETORIC OF MOUNTAIN BIKING

I have been a cyclist for some 40 years as an adult.  I have never been without a bike or two in my shed, somewhere.  That's because I fell in love-literally in love- with cycling.  I was living in a one bed flat in St Annes on Sea in Lancashire, having just moved up from Cambridge and obtained a job as a forklift driver in a light engineering factory.  This involved a six mile commute each way and I had no car or horse.  A bike was the only answer and so I obtained a shiny new Raleigh racing bike from a catalogue and was set to go.  The first few weeks were a nightmare as my body was shocked into fitness with muscle groups stretching and strengthening and the heart and lungs enlarging exponentially and then it came:  That magical moment when the body and the bike merge into one symbiotic unit that can just keep going over endless miles, accelerate, climb, swerve as necessary and with serotonin flowing through the brain forcing you to just burst into song in order to release the joy.  That's how I fell in love with cycling.  Through a ten mile daily commute along busy A roads with a brief cycle lane available for a small portion of the distance.  And the bike became my single vehicle-if I was invited to friends in Manchester sixty miles away, I cycled.  If I wanted a camping weekend in the Lakes I strapped and tied some old tent (Vango Force 10 !!!) and sleeping bag to the bike and cycled.  If I had to go over a hundred and fifty miles I'd sleep in some bus shelter to avoid a rainstorm as it never occurred to me, at that point, to wild camp in the woods.  Cycling became my single choice of movement.  I exchanged my now knackered silver Raleigh (Uther) in 1986 for a shit brown Orbit Horizon tourer (Chokka) which I rode thousands of miles before attaining the glory of a silver grey Dawes Super Galaxy (Miles Eater) in 1992 which, though riding many thousands of miles, I never really warmed to, emotionally.  The Dawes was nicked, only fairly recently (curses upon you thief!)

It was then that I moved to my current mount, technologically at the current apex of bike development- a Scott E-genius Electric Mountain Bike (The Beast) circa 2017.  

I should add that I bought one of the first Mountain bikes to be seen in the UK- a Saracen, painted lime green with thick steel tubes and knobbly tires round 1989 to explore the local moors around Ramsbottom and it became a great mount for my children to ride on as tots on the bike seat.  

No suspension of course but great fun as I recall until it got nicked in December 1995 along with my son's brand new bike which was his Christmas present.

I should also add that I bought my first Brompton in 1992 from Bicycle Doctor in Manchester, where I also bought my Galaxy.  It was a great little tool for short commuting and I even used it briefly in central France for a spot of touring and loved it a lot until it was nicked in 2012 locked up at Preston Park Station in Brighton.  My new Brompton is laquer styled frame, six geared (reduced) with a Son hub dynamo, Brooks saddle and snazzy leather Brooks grips.  She's a real beauty.  Twitchy ride but good for ten-20 miles and with the addition of a waterproof big front bag made by Ortlieb in shocking orange.

I have always lusted after the mythical Rohloff gearing system, fully enclosed in an oil bath and practically maintenance-free.  Up in Glasgow Kinetic Cycles do a Brompton Rohloff conversion, yeah a Rohloff conversion turning the wee toadie into a full blown beast of a touring machine.  Throw me in a Gates Carbon drive too could you?  Oh and a Son dynamo lighting system!

Here with credit to the editor of the splendid journal from Bikepacking.com are his excellent thoughts:

1. CHANGE (THE RHETORIC)

As the editor at BIKEPACKING.com, I see a lot of bike related content. After a while, it’s easy to gloss over the prevailing tone of mainstream mountain biking media, social streams and culture. You know, the one where trails aren’t just ridden. They’re ripped, crushed, owned, and shredded. Scenery is supplanted by skids, tail whips and big air. All too often, the image of mountain biking is portrayed as destroying land, not savoring it. This overtly aggressive lexicon has also slipped into the words, visual language, culture, clothing, and graphics that define it.THIS OVERTLY AGGRESSIVE LEXICON HAS ALSO SLIPPED INTO THE WORDS, VISUAL LANGUAGE, CULTURE, CLOTHING, AND GRAPHICS THAT DEFINE IT. It’s no wonder other land user groups fear us. Don’t get me wrong, I appreciate carving fast singletrack just as much as anyone. Mountain bikes are incredible machines and the skillsets that individuals have developed to push them to their limits is amazing. But I also think there is a softer, alternative voice that needs to be heard, nurtured, and grown.

Fortunately, the rise of bikepacking presents the opportunity to seize a new vernacular. One that offsets aggressive imagery with that focused on stewardship and appreciation. One that places landscapes, cultures, exploration, and solace over hits and berms. The language of bikepacking, both literal and visual, hinges on words like ‘remote’, ‘access’, ‘wander’, and ‘backcountry’. Visuals that tell a story that goes beyond outright speed and technical mastery. We see this as an extremely positive message, especially in the face of worldwide land access issues. With the right educational information around ethics and advocacy, we believe in the value of encouraging the growth of this alternative perception of mountain biking.

DOES RELIGION DRIVE MEN MAD?

 THE IMPLACABLE NATURE OF THE IDEA

I  observe, as many do, the unfolding disaster in Gaza and thoughts emerge unbidden in my mind.

I wonder about countries and religion and how so often these modes of supposed salvation drive men and women into vortices of complete madness leading to unthinkable cruelty and barbarism.

How human men (and they are mostly men) will murder children, rape women and torture their fellow humans with gleeful commitment, even enthusiasm for inflicting the maximum level of pain and humiliation. 

How is all this possible?

My answer is expressed with all humility as these are simply my thoughts, those motes of dust in the wind.  But I strive for some anchor for the immense pain I feel in my heart upon watching this unfolding cataclysm of hatred and horror in the Middle East.

My sense is that this all begins in the mind.  That what we witness here is a result of thoughts and imagination replacing reality.

Let us take a comparison.  Look at what we call countries.  Do they exist?  Well yes, we consider we come from a particular country. When we are asked the question where are you from we will often reply, well I'm from the UK or I am from South Africa or I am from Brazil or I am an Israeli or I am a Palestinian. 

In this sense our country of birth or a new nationality we have taken on becomes a large part of what we may refer to as our identity, it describes part of what we perceive as our essential Self, our being.

Then we may be asked by this imaginary interviewer-What are you about?  What do you believe?  And often, what do you do?

But let’s pause a moment at the question of our country.  What is a country?  Is it not simply an idea?

There are no real lines of demarcation in nature that determines what group of Homo sapiens will live in a specific area. Those borders are created inside someone’s head and often collide with other ideas of conquest, war, colonisation and economic expansion.

These ideas collect behind the original idea of ‘country’ and what is an imaginary reality becomes more real than the actual reality. An endless train of countless carriages hurtling on its way to another constructed idealised reality.

Because the fact is that countries do not exist in actual reality. In many ways they are fictionalised entities that are concretised in imaginary nature but they cannot exist in nature because they are not real.  They are ideas.

If we imagine the human species were to instantly vanish what would be left?  Well there would be buildings, temples, prisons, immense cities, ports, lots of walls and fences, military bases and seaside resorts.  But there would be no countries.  Because countries do not exist in independent reality.  They are ideas of place rather than place itself.

If we look at a mountain, say Kilimanjaro, we can see that it exists in nature.  It is an existential fact that is not dependent on thoughts or belief systems for its being a concrete part of nature.  Unlike countries, which only truly exist in the minds of their inhabitants and therefore have no concrete existence in nature.

Is it not the saddest thing that what drives the great wars and slaughters is simply an idea?  

Perhaps we should get rid of this idea and simply live on our planet?

Religion too is perhaps the most powerful of these ideas based as it is on the single strongest driver of division between humans - the idea of God. And then inevitable meditations upon the nature of this God.

Whether it be called Jesus or Jehovah or Allah or the Lord Buddha or the Creator, or Shiva, these are all versions of the same idea.  An imaginary Being that requires a set of rules and beliefs and behaviour to be placated or worshipped or honoured.  Rules that can be infringed with resulting punishments.  Highly varied schema of intolerance is directed between these different ideas and it underpins the continuing holocaust between humans located in their various idealised territories that we call countries.

I will nail my own colours to the mast.  I do not know if there is a God.  I choose not to believe that there is because I choose not to believe in something I cannot understand.  If God has existence it would surpass our understanding containing within itself all meaning. 

In the seventeenth century Spinoza made the case that God must be part of natural law and that therefore miracles cannot have taken place because they are in defiance of natural law and that consequently the Bible must be taken as metaphor, not fact.  He also stated that this God acting in accord with natural law, with Nature, is highly unlikely to require strictly determined rules of behaviour or ceremonial activity or specific dress as these are simply ideas from the imagination of humans.

Spinoza’s ethics, massively simplified, state that humans should live in accordance with natural law and thus acquire what he called ‘blessedness’.

I can live with this ‘idea’, it makes sense to me to seek ‘blessedness’ though I struggle with the acquisition.

However given my own ‘ideas’ on the subject I am most content to allow my fellow humans to worship and pray to whatever God they imagine and I wish them comfort from it.  I do not however consider this gives them any right to predate and destroy and discriminate on those who interpret this most ungraspable of notions in a different way from themselves.

I was brought up in the Roman Catholic Faith and even attended a Seminary as a boy, destined for the Priesthood, when, as a devastated 14 year old I came to the realisation  that this was all nonsense upon stilts.

Perhaps then we should get rid of both ideas.  That of Nations and that of Religions.  Perhaps we should just be in the world.

None of this helps the men, women and children of Gaza facing annihilation or the avenging Israeli’s who have lost their loved one’s in Hamas’s shocking assault.

But like many others I stand mute in the face of this unfolding catastrophe.  I stand mute, looking at the cold, hard and vengeful eyes of the leaders and the blood of the innocent which will once again flow into the river of human time and the circle of hate growing, ever growing.  Once again I stand mute and uncomprehending at the implacable nature of The Idea.

THE GREAT CORMAC McCARTHY PASSES 16TH JUNE 2023

ME AND BOB DYLAN

Me ’n Bob Dylan. 

Me’n Bob Dylan first got together in 1975.  We met through an intermediary, a tiny, moustachioed Geordie accountant called Ken with the features of a vertically challenged Apache who had been thrown in the hot wash, warrior-hook nose, high cheekbones and imperious and coldly mysterious mien, crowned with a shock of jet black hair.  He did not carry a tomahawk.  Ken was the first proper Bobcat I had met and such relationships lead to an almost continual exposure to Bobness of all kinds.  A kind of cultish indoctrination but with a large joint maybe substituting for the waterboarding bits and a chilled setting where the Bobcat endlessly spins his (sometimes hers but not too commonly) carefully curated vinyl discs of Bob’s truth-strummings .  Bobcats seem to be obsessive collectors and, for many of them the vinyl revival was immaterial as they will just keep on keeping on, till the wheels fall off and burn, as it were.

Ken however did have one early recognised substantial problem.  He appeared to suffer from significant alcohol induced psychosis.  After only three pints the wiry little Geordie would up and target a likely victim or group of victims, it mattered not how many, how big or how tall.  And he would proceed to scare them shitless.  I will always remember him confronting a group of hairy bikers enjoying an innocent pint in a Blackpool pub and offering them all outside where he was going to ‘fook the lot of yoo fooking bastards’.  The bikers who had been sprawled across their table like a tribe of vikings out for rape and plunder, meekly gathered their helmets and left, looking back at him fearfully.

I explained to Ken patiently, for the umpteenth time, that I could not tolerate his continual transformation into a psychopathic bully after consuming miniscule amounts of alcohol.  I told him that scaring people was wrong and the clincher, I told him Bob would never approve of such behaviour.

We had a row.  He offered me outside for a fooking.  Upon the instant of the fight, He punched a metal bin hard enough to break his knuckles and truth be told I never actually saw him fight anyone.  It was all to do with the threat of a fight, with the fear arising from his violent presentation. I went off in a huff.  He chased after me and begged, literally begged me, to return with him to his house claiming his wife would never understand if I didn’t go back with him.  Despite my better judgement I went back and as I mused upon the surreal night’s happenings he put ‘Blood on the Tracks’ on and I finally understood, listening to that album for maybe the tenth time, what all the fuss was about.  All my heart’s pain came welling up.  All the loss.  All the missed chances.  But hell!  We’re only sitting around listening to music.  Why are we all sinking into maudlin musings, suicidal ideation and holding back the tears as well as the night?  That’s Bob for you.  He’ll sucker punch you in a minute.  ‘Tell her she can look me up…If she’s got the time…’  Nobody can kick you in the guts so snarlingly, so caringly, so duplicitously, so poetically. 

Typically, as a scaredy-cat kind of a guy, I went back to the beginning of the work, so as not to miss anything, not the total beginning but just to ‘Freewheelin Bob Dylan’ with the picture of Bobby and Suze crunching through the New York snow, over the graves of countless dead Indians.  Cute.

But it wasn’t really what I was up for.  ‘Girl from the North Country’ is a pretty song for sure but it didn’t measure up to the ‘Blood on the Tracks’ pain and rage.  I moved quickly on to ‘Another Side of Bob Dylan’ with Bob in Guthrie-style workshirt and ‘Grapes of Wrath’ style ‘seen-it-all-eyes’ on the cover. Bob, who’s never jumped a train or done a days physical labour, slaving in the burning sun of a Californian fruit pickin’ farm with his Mexican compadres, in his life, staring out at you like he’s definitely bound for glory.  But ‘Chimes of Freedom’ is a great song, and it speaks of an ability to feel the pain and transmit it with enormous empathic resonance.  ‘Times they are a changin’? Well I’ve always thought it was a shit song man!  Get out of the way!  Hells-a-comin’ to breakfast sort of vibe.

So I moved on to ‘Bringing it all back home’ and that was it.  I touched the raging wellspring of genius from which I recognised the eruption of ‘Blood on the tracks’ and my mind was well and truly blown.  Did ’Subterranean Homesick Blues’ predict rap?  Like many young lost souls I knew without doubt that I was down with Johnny in the basement watching him mix it up.

In 1974 I opened an Open Air concert in the amphitheatre in Stanley Park in Blackpool (yes yes, I know!) and sang, solo, ‘It’s alright Ma, I’m only bleeding.’  I must have been crazy but I learned that a guitar in your hand is a major attractor to the female sex.  Thanks for that Bob!  Thanks for all that pain! Thanks for nuthin’ Bobby!

I spent hours listening to the album on repeat play and allowing it’s chaotic rhymes and antsy visionary images to wash over me, turning me into a tiny Bob-figurine.  I changed my hair to duplicate Bob’s mop, got a leather jacket and obtained a new nose from somewhere.  I began to smoke incessantly and even slept wearing my Raybans.

Then I encountered the inevitability of ‘Highway 61 Revisited.’

The miracle of ‘Like a Rolling Stone’ described so memorably by Bruce Springsteen as the first hit of the snare drum being like the sound of the door of your mind being kicked open.

This album changed the way I thought about music.  It changed me.  It alerted me to the magical marriage of snarly poetry and rasping guitar.  It got me loving the organ.  Whoever would have invested so much in a whining harmonica?  It taught me the meaning of resistance through poetry and song. Like all the great texts it educated me.   

Because I too was in the kitchen with the Tombstone Blues.  I too was checking out suitable properties on Desolation Row.  I was obsessed with the wee speed-addled chappie.  I was in love with Bob’s rage.  I had become a Bobcat.

Fast forward with me to Earl’s Court 1983 and I’m staring at the thousands of clean looking Christians holding their lit lighters aloft and occasionally shouting ‘Praise the Lord!’ or ‘Hallelujah!’  To return to my spinster analogy I regarded them with the curiosity of someone attending a fancy dress party where a particular few are naked.  What exactly are these people doing here I thought.

Bob’s up there on stage looking a tad chunkier than I thought he should.  And he looks a bit pissed off.  A bit miserable.  It’s the Shot of Love Tour and I’m encountering the last ebbs and flows of Bob’s born-again conversion.

Jesus had personally spoken to him, of course he had, who else would he speak to on this bereft planet apart from Bob and maybe the Dalai Lama?  But Bob was getting bored-you could tell that.

With a wave of his hand and a snarl, he sends the Band off and returns alone with his acoustic guitar and harmonica.

Here’s his set list for the night-(A Tammy Wynette cover!!!!)

Gotta Serve Somebody

I Believe in You

Like a Rolling Stone

'Til I Get It Right  (Tammy Wynette cover)

Man Gave Names to All the Animals

Maggie's Farm

Simple Twist of Fate

Ballad of a Thin Man

Girl From the North Country

Dead Man, Dead Man

Slow Train

Abraham, Martin and John  (Dion cover)

Slow Train

Just Like Tom Thumb's Blues

In the Summertime

Mr. Tambourine Man

Solid Rock

Just Like a Woman

Watered-Down Love

What Can I Do for You?

All Along the Watchtower

Lenny Bruce

When You Gonna Wake Up?

In the Garden

Blowin' in the Wind

Don't Think Twice, It's All Right

Knockin' on Heaven's Door 

That’s not a bad little menu for a Bobcat!  But for me it proved to be a temporary Swansong and we were to part for many years.

The Christianity killed off my mad enthusiasm and with the death of John Lennon I went off with The Beatles and Miles Davis and Stockhausen to another party. I still flirted with Bob though, like old friends whose paths have diverted in the wood but who remain in touch for birthdays, weddings and funerals.

Then, years later I got hold of ‘Time out of Mind’ slapped it on my playlist, listened to it about twenty times and Bam!  There I was once again hit by these amazing lyrics, and this great tight band.  TOOM was released in 1982 but I collided with it in 2018 and here I remain, a returnee to the fold, having just purchased the Mobile Fidelity vinyl Ultrasound recording of ‘Blood on the tracks’ for zillions of pounds and wow, but its mean tragedy drills deeper than ever. 

November 2022- And here comes ‘Rough and Rowdy Ways’ with it’s 17 minute clincher track

1983 fast forwards to 2022. The gig at Manchester Apollo.  The tickets are scammed online with massively inflated prices with viagogo.  The t shirts at £30 each.  Bob behind his piano.  A bit doddery but in fine voice with amazing interpretations of 'I contain multitudes' and especially a wonderful reinterpretation of ‘it’s all over now Baby Blue .’

I am struck initially by the hordes of Mancunians filling the theatre carrying giant 2 pint plastic glasses and I sit there prune faced and tight lipped like a disapproving spinster invited to an orgy.  They’ll be pissing all through the gig I say spitefully to my wife, Millie who tell’s me to chill the fuck out. Bob and his band emerge out of darkness onto the stage.  Is it him?  Where is he? Oh he’s there in his sparkly jacket.  Yes its him! I can just make out his head behind that piano bobbing up and down like a sniper’s invitation-'they shot him down like a dog' he later drawls.

Dylan's band were:

Tony Garnier – bass.

Charley Drayton – drums.

Bob Britt – guitar.

Doug Lancio – guitar.

Donnie Herron – violin, electric mandolin, pedal steel, lap steel.

And yes, those two pint plastic glass-slurping fuckers were pissing though the entire gig!