VecchioJo's blog

What was the product again?

Some of us do our utmost to be Pro, slammed stem, the right socks, legs smooth as hewn marble, vain glances in reflective windows to check that our poise is just so… The truth is most of the time we are just galumphing about in too-tight clothing compared to that elegant mix of power and grace that real cyclists have, and deep down we know it, all bark and no bike.

No-one could ever accuse the Gadget Show on Channel 5 of serious in-depth reviews in their reportage of electro wizardry and boys toys. The programme is a guilty pleasurable way to blob out and enjoy the techno-japery, especially when in that post-ride mid-muffin brain mush, but sometimes the gogglebox gets it so spectacularly wrong that it has you spitting tea at the screen and sending the better half to the bureau to fetch the Parker and Basildon Bond to pen a strongly worded letter.

Strava, Facebook, Twitter, Endomondo, Flickr, mapmyride - these days it’s almost impossible for people to go for a ride without turning it into a multi-media event*, to the point where if someone doesn’t upload a picture or tweet it or log the miles it’s as if the ride never happened, because there’s no proof that it ever existed.

No thanks to the schoolboy error of doing a big ride on the Saturday and then buckling under the stares of social respectability, Sunday is spent doing Normal Things.

A late start with a leisurely breakfast followed by a purposeless amount of time hanging about waiting for nothing to happen has legs hidden by and trapped inside jeans twitching in some kind of Pavlovian Response as by this hour on any other Sunday they’d be out the door a while back and somewhere skipping halfway up a hill.

It’s time to go for a ride, actually it was time to go for a ride about half an hour ago, but I’ve only now finished procrastinating. Just answered those e-mails, just done that little bit of washing up, had another coffee, just played with the cat, just taken the t-shirts off the washing line, folded socks, just checked e-mail, just, just, just…. Anything but ride.

Everybody needs to suffer, to make suffering easier.

*Ping*

E-mail from friend, usual suspects in the cc. Want to do this? Pedal to the Lewes Wanderers Reliability Ride that starts about 25 miles away, do that, ride home, stop for some cake somewhere in the middle, should be about 80 miles all in all.

Sounds just like a Sunday ride then, but a little bit different, a good day out.

Yes.

This is the Ride Bunny.
Say hello to the Ride Bunny.

The Ride Bunny sits patiently by the front door, waiting.

Every time I go for a ride I feed the Ride Bunny some money. Hungry Ride Bunny.
On the way out the door I nourish him with some loose change, £1, £1.50, maybe a £2 coin if the Ride Bunny’s been good.  A small snack of money that goes mostly unnoticed but over the months builds to quite a full tummy for the Ride Bunny.

I still have my first pair of ‘proper’ cycling shorts, they’ve not been worn for decades, literally, there’s a big old hole in them and the stitching is perished and unravelled, but I simply can’t bring myself to throw them out. Every time I rummage in the shorts pile they’ll emerge like spent ordnance from a long forgotten battle in a ploughed field, smiled at and returned to the mess.