Have the wheels come off your company pension fund?

Somebody must think I’m a nutter…. like they want me to go out and buy a unicycle, then learn to ride it and join a mass protest.

I ought to say no, no and no. Go away on all three scores, only this a protest about pensions and it's right outside Parliament and it’s in the summer and…. it's coming from a construction firm.

The message behind this summons-to-madness, sent by a pair of 50-somethings Gerry and Fran, and no, that’s not their waistline measurements, is that pensions in the private sector are dire (I agree, well in part) … and in some construction firms they either worrying or abysmal (I again agree, well in part).

But…you, dear reader, might actually be more vociferous than me on this one, so how about a deal? Like you can take my part and do the one-wheel-wobble stint while I’ll hive off to France on two wheels instead. See, I already have a plan. So deal done?

In the office, Erroll is being a pain.

He’s eliminating my get-out clause, like telling me that they cost next-to-nothing on eBay. We’re talking unicycles. Cheap enough even for me. I pretend I can’t hear so what does he do? He comes round and gets right it on up my screen and forces my hand.

Erroll has this a gold-plated card (commonly known as a sucker account) on eBay as in the space of a quarterly phone bill he has bought 43 wooden sheds (all bargains, but 12 with no doors) , 19 bikes (three intact) (almost), 12 oboes (the result of a typing mistake) and a wind-sock (shhhh…but that was entered by Julius and me one lunchtime when we were on our own and in prank mode)

The steam engine (built in Inverurie) has been sent back.

Thanks to Erroll I now have five live bids running (apparently). I can see me ending with five unicycles. Only they are all potential bargains, so I’m told. But I don’t want five bargains. Get them off. My protest goes unheeded and so next news I’m being offered a really cheap shed, it has three lapboard sides, to put them in.

It’s in Upperthong, in the hills behind Hunddersfield, so there’s the chance of a visit to that lap dancer cousin we know. No wonder Erroll is offering to come and help me collect it.

The Tour de Force was supposed to be the end to this madness stuff. But look, I’ve never been on a mass protest. I’ve never been in a pensions protest. I’ve never been on a uni-cycle.

But it would be nice to join in.

So perhaps I’ll spread the load, issue a challenge to someone. Who's mad enough? Mmmm, well Johnny I-have-more-horses-than-bikes Wates comes to mind….if he does it then I will.

Perhaps we could even ride as a trio with cyclist-of-repute Adam Shutkever, Accord’s finance director, making up the team. Are you listening Adam??

Is it all just Midlands madness? No, not at all. These people at Polyblox Construction in Queslett, Gerry and Fran, see it like this…..the wheels have been coming off company pension schemes, one by one, so that they’re now pretty much like a unicycle, rolling round the last-chance saloon and in danger of crashing to a total halt altogether.

So what could be more appropriate than a mass protest outside Parliament on one-wheeled transport. There is a logic, you must agree.

Plus there’s this paradox....like all the mounting worries are all in the private sector. Gerry and Fran are fuming at having to have to cough up £900 a year to fund gold-plated public sector pensions when they’re in such a mess elsewhere/on the home front.

Polyblox of Queslett only needs to go bust (it was well in the red two years ago when a client put itself into liquidation in order to not pay) and they’d be in a pickle as their pension fund is under-funded big-time. Like past management funded golf tournaments OK but let the pension pot boil close-to-dry.

The cost of inflation-linked pension schemes for six million state employees such as doctors, nurses, teachers and policemen has climbed to £22bn. Whose going to pay for that? Julius here says the only answer is more breeding. He’s keen to play his part. His offers have so far been turned down.

This is all planned for June 21, like the longest day. The cycling, that is, not the breeding.

Back in our office, Edward Scissorhands has a new personal bank. Coutts. Split-pea wants to know if they lick your boots.

The Speckled Hen, now a legend in her own time, has had a breathless encounter with a pre-op transexual. We’re talking of a car prang of medium seriousness.

Out pops the other driver, pink jeans and all. Only the closer-up version was a curious combination of both stubble and breasts. And with a voice like Lee Marvin. Well, we can’t all be a wandering star. But OK, lets try a wandering car. Head on or side impact?

Split-pea has applied to become a barnwinkle. He’s told me in strict confidence. The rest off the office deny their existence, you see. Only I know one. A barnwinkle. He’s in PR. He's rude when I phone. It's lovely.

The tinitis gets no better, in fact it gets worse. It’s never ending. I thought the entire world was marching over gravel yesterday only it was Julius eating a bag of crisps without taking them out of the bag. In a previous life, I think the man must have been a raccoon.

Someone read about my trick of getting grand-daughter, 11-month old Beth, climbing up windows on all-fours, well with hands and feet stuck into slices of malt-loaf. Like on suction pads. It’s all the rage in playgroups in Reigate now, I’m advised. A caller asked which brand is best. I’ve asked Tintin to undertake trials.

Erroll is coming round holding up a bunch of fingers. Five. Oh no. I think my bids have come up trumps.

Gravy can be hoovered.... but Polarity fails to attract

I was hoping some memorable quote might surface during the Christmas fun-run. Just for you.

Only serious verbal abuse was in short supply until Alex, dearest daughter’s boyfriend of some length of time now, best measured in terms of one garden and one kitchen upgrade, said his family were alcoholics while our side were nutters.

That was nice. I got the better bottle of red wine out at that point and poured him a liberal splash.

Nicky’s dad (and the “other” grandfather to the tiny offspring Beth) is a professor. He specialises in secondary metabolism. Puts me to shame. I tried to understand but he went hiving off after mulled wine. He’s also an expert on fungi.

I had a walk with Vic and Alex. We sprang across a row of slippery stepping stones, beating quite an aggressive river flow, and went hiving off up Box Hill in some style until the huffing triggered a stop and that triggered more of the Ray Mears stuff. I’m a bit worried at what these people know.

Last time it was King Alfred's Cakes.... this time it’s Jews' ears. Fingers pointed and I’m looking at them all round a tree trunk. Brown silky sprouts of decay. They suggest I have some. Whole. In soup. I again think about re-writing my will. I just don’t have confidence in this dodgy mushroom and fungus stuff.

Another time we shot about 50 Canadian geese on the River Mole and traded them with a Romanian guy, well Hana the Serbian sniper did. I’m just a middleman. He knows a restaurant in Kingston-on-Thames. You’d not believe it but four days later there was as many again flying in and scoffing the decent grass.

The gravy got spilt on Christmas Day. All over the table and close on a riot ensued. Luckily, I was able to grab little Beth, now all of 11 months old, and hold her out and run her mouth over it, like Hoover-fashion, before it poured on the carpet. She smiled. Little treasure.

If the relations from up Huddersfield got wind of that, like us spilling gravy, we’d have them northern hordes down here, exacting punishment.

I was telling Ron, cyclist, about that family wedding up in Yorkshire, in the hills behind Holmfirth back in the summer. This was at the reception and we were already laughing at nothing and several knew this absent-but-parallel family. How people go different ways – there’s a daughter who’s ticking full on brainpower and she’s at Girton College, Oxford, while her cousin is spinning her fortune as a lap dancer.

She lives in Upperthong. I didn’t think that was at all funny but Ron almost fell off his bike.

He needed a chuckle. His son Les has separated from Liz and their three kids. So what’s he done now….set up with someone new called Liz who has four kids. What a swap… three of yours for four of hers. Deal or no deal.

Ron senses trouble. The new squadra live temporarily in this protected house as there was beating involved beforehand. I must see if Erroll has some spare sheds ready to download from eBay.

The weather was so bad one day over Christmas that I left the bike indoors and went out walking with Hazel. There we were in big boots, waterproof trousers, all buttoned down, me with the trademark umbrella struggling to stay up there in the elements.

We bludgeoned along, over a little path across the railway line south of Homewood and then squelched into this field, a sea of mud and water and a few remnant splashes of yellow stubble of a well-gone crop of wheat. Could anyone else be this mad?

Well yes actually….. there was this guy in the field in shorts. Playing golf. Well practicing hits and with a daft dog doing the retrievals.

Then up the hill a bit, onto firmer stuff like a farm track and here it comes…..dibble, dibble, dibble…. and there’s this splendid weasel crossing right in front of our noses.

We have a domestic argument brewing over snails. I like them. Only this time I’m not the one at the receiving end, no, it’s the neighbours. Their snails are crawling into us. Not just that but they are “foreign snails”. I’m intrigued by the “foreign” tag but don’t like to show it.

Uncle Festa has been having trouble with his eye. The second cornea was a good one as it was from a younger man in America, but it’s not settled and the poor stitching is giving him jip. He’s been back to hospital to have it ironed down.

I thought that when we were in Belgium in August for the big race last summer, a high point of my year, that I came bottom of the class. Only we got the results published in the post last week.

I was 51st and sure enough that made me the lowest-placed English rider. I expected that. Still, doing a world championships at all is something to be happy about, to my way of thinking.

But what I spotted, or should I say didn’t spot, was Uncle Festa. Nine names in all from England but his was totally missing. I’d had my suspicions all along, that he nipped in to see the Chinese nurse in the First Aid tent not after the race ended but while the rest of us were still in battle.

Mind you it really was a battle. I know you’ll scoff when I say this, but I got dropped three times when we went over…… a speed hump.

There was only one such hump per lap, thank goodness, and sure enough I got back on. Three times. But the fourth time I didn’t.

It had been criterium-style racing from the gun and I was on the rack at every corner, but I never expected to get blown out on such a pimple. I mean I went up the Galibier this summer and the Croix de Fer and the Col du Mollard.

Back at work now and the customary greeting of barn-pots.

The Speckled Hen tried to clone herself on New Year’s Eve. Seems that there was this scam being pulled on the cash machine in Leatherhead and in/out went her card and the cloners got to work only the good news was that the scam had been running for two days already and the bank were snaffling everything up. So that was close.

Bex and Buttons are both under orders to come to yoga. Not my orders. Exactly whose orders is not clear. Also Rob Roy, back from a New Year camping spree in the carrot fields around The Wash (I worry about that boy), has announced that he too is to become a yoga-toga. Good grief, we’ll all be playing statues next. Like in the break-out zone.

Happily, our chunk-stay Christmas feeders moved out after two days with half the Christmas pudding intact. I had it under guard. Still have and if any foreign snail should come within five paces the little slim-rider will be…..posted off to Skelmanthorpe.

However they (or you) could be reprieved if they (you) can show me how to play Polarity.

It was to be my Christmas party-piece. New game. Award-winning game in fact according to the spread in the Daily Telegraph. I love games so this was to be a treat. Only it wasn’t. It was a washout, we couldn’t work out the rules.

I mean I couldn’t work out the rules. So Alex took them out of my hand. Only that got us no further, which made me feel a bit better, so I poured him some more of the wine. Nice boy.

New Year come, New Year gone…. that means my interval training sessions get harder.

Out go the 60-sec type and in come the 30-sec ones…. so more watts and less recovery. January can be so painful.

Thank goodness there’s the axed-off Christmas pud left and a few cans of Guinness hidden behind the sofa. Well, unless either our foreign snails or Hoover-bird Beth got there on their crawls.

Best get a’gait.

SAS rations crumble on my knee as the dogs of war get high on cannabis

I’m driving fast and talking big mouthfuls, heading west from London, for Wales and the Newport Velodrome, my own track bike and one other stacked in the back. My passenger is full of news. I’m hooked, I’m into fascination mode.

I do love these magic moments when something totally unexpected and interesting hits you, lifts you above your anticipated swirl.

I’m not paying eye attention down there, but my man has just slid something onto my left knee. I’m doing 90. Oops, consider that a misprint, officer. It’s one of his sandwiches. He’s well prepared. He always carries food, he says, as a result of having been in the SAS. The what!!

Well, we’ll have to come back to that but first, the practice zone. Isn’t someone else’s private life interesting? You know, when you can put your nose in and wiggle.

His mother - and we’re talking about an 88-year-old here - has just downsized from a house with too-big grounds into something much smaller. The difference runs to £900,000 and I’m thinking wow. Mother’s plan is for the dosh to be halved but sister’s plan is to pocket the lot.

Really, as a tight-fisted Yorkshireman, I should be gobsmacked by the money layer on all this, but strangely I’m not on too much alert there…. rather the vision of the sister’s chase for the lot.

So I switch into NLP-mode (you’ll hear lots of that from now on). I need to practice my NLP. How much detail will he comfortably give me? How can I ask the right questions and have a good delve?

Those parts of the sandwich safe inside me are fine, only much of the crumbly bread keeps rolling off my leg, like in little torrents, in a two-sided peeling off at every bump, down into the deep-below where I seldom look. I got most of the ham though.

He’s a charmer with a refined voice, basking through life as a former Rotary Club chap would. In fact I’m getting everything by way of signals that doesn’t square at all with him being in the SAS.

Come on there, stop dithering……NLP…it’s Neuro Linguistic Programming.

I can’t laugh. Hey I didn’t know even when the surprise book first arrived and I was looking at the cover and it was there in big letters. NLP. It took Maria David to explain. She was on the phone. She was just a cyclist until that moment, she having this insight into psychology was a big surprise.

I set myself a challenge, despite the speed and all, of extracting something stunningly revealing about what the SAS do. But I suspect that he set himself the counter-challenge of skidding me round the edges in tantalising fashion. All done with such charm.

His time round, the SAS applicants ran to 360, including numerous burly gymnastic guys, the sort you imagine to be already secretly running amok out there on our behalf.

By the end of the elimination process just 32 got through. And the burly buys? No, all gone. They bought it during the session to assess mental resistance when under interrogation.

That’s it. I can’t get much more….other than a laugh. They were in mid-Wales, see, on an exercise. Driven to the middle of nowhere and tipped out along with their kits and pots and pans. Even the chicken crates were dumped, the contents running eagerly away in an instant.

It took a full 15 minutes to get through the main instructions. Then questions. Where are the rations? How come no food? The food. You’ve got it. It’s the chickens. You want to eat them? Well, go catch them.

I love riding on the track, only there’s no gear to go up when you want to go up a gear. These numerous Welsh hobbits that turn up with little white beards they don’t half show me a clean pair of heels. I’m shamed. One said he was in his mid-70s.

The Japanese tourist board wants Julius on a calendar. Even in the cold, we still get helicopters outside the windows. We’re on fifth-floor now rather than on the tenth. But they’ve found us. Middle-aged Japanese women, all smiles and eagerness. I think the Japanese must get issued with a video camera at birth.

Every morning, our boy arrives and strips off to the waist as if they’re not out there in the morning air. What a clamour there is, it’s like in outer Croydon when Maria Sharapova she comes for tea with Edward Scissorhands. No, no…only joking there.

There’s a sponsor wanting his name on Julius’s torso. Immac. I have a confession - I don’t even know what that is. A deal is coming….only the hairy back must go. Julius will end up like these over-aged boxers you see on Eurosport, you know doing those cheap, low-grade bouts broadcast live from some French mining town close to the border with Belgium.

The Shining Light says that with Tintin now having four he should have the snip. Well that triggered quite a response. It dimmed the light, but only temporarily. So now she wants me to snuggle up to Ray O’Rourke. The mind boggles.

Mr Rotary-and-SAS-combination man threw me another wobbly, wonderfully unexpected. In fact two. He pays £80 a month for coaching…. and he’s training on a Powertap.

So we’re driving hard and talking Powertap, like him training to a plan and collecting data.

His follow-up surprise… he’s telling me about this Powertap girl who rides for Ireland and lives in Grenoble. Hey!! I know her, I stayed with her in the summer. He thinks I’m joking. Funny how some people don’t take me seriously.

Sure you remember the happenings at the polka-dot cult centre known as King of the Mountains, the specialist chalet for cyclists right across the valley from Alpe d’Huez.

It’s that time of year when the snows could be coming, so cut the logs and do the books. Time for a chat. We have this website vision, them and me, and the background is being painted in.

Well hello to news and it’s all change on the outdoor entertainment front. In the summertime, see, we’d file out clutching a coffee for a few minutes in the sun out on the balcony at the back of what was once the village school.

I had an excuse for loitering like this as I was aching from the day before, from riding Stage 16 of the Tour de Force….up to Toussuire.

But the rest – like Dave and Adam and the South Coast boys – were tapering for the Marmotte. To visualise it, think fat-boy-fest, think of the calorific combination of facing up to home-made cake while texting the wife/girl-friend/psychologist/whatever and reporting the ardours of the day.

The little stone shelf out the back was a fun place because you could gaze right down into someone else’s private life, into a neighbor’s back yard with its high wall and bare-earth, trodden half-shiny by two ever-circling dogs. Big ones. The sort you’d not want to go in with.

Day by day they each worked at their own tunnel, burrowed deeper and deeper under the one and only plant, the one protected from the ground up by a strong metal frame and a coating of plastic. This price and joy Christmas for its owner was in fact quite a splendid cannabis plant with lots of very healthy leaves.

Well moving on, one day in September is seems, Raphael the man dug the entire plant up and as the Irish would say…there it was…gone. What a lovely phrase that is.

Next news, the whole village went from high to higher. We’re talking of a mountain-top community here…. you know hardy survivor types in sturdy houses that are all squeezed together, braced against the elements. All narrow passages, fine for a horse, tight for a car, like with a decent stretch you can water the neighbour’s window box while still standing on your own threshold.

Madness rules. The dogs are out the gate and on the prowl, that’s not surprising with the gate flapping wide open. Our Helyn and a further posse round them up mid-morning. Turns out they’re surprisingly docile…. perhaps those roots they’d been sniffing.

When the posse usher the happy hounds back inside Raphael’s house, the place resembles a scene from a drugs-bust documentary with the main man totally zonked out on the sofa, rolled joints and joint rolling items strewn at random, tv babbling incessantly, trivia from the previous night and the whole place smelling to high heaven.

And a fast-forward to today? Well, the boy he done gone. Dogs an’ all.

Me….I’m on the move too, off out to meet the Multiplex man in Berkeley Square. Bring on the nightingales. Well, bring on the quaffing elbow and the red wine. We’re down to talking business, this is squashed into The Guinea, a fabulous little squeeze-in of a pub that is so totally out of fashion that I love it. Like the Tanners Arms was/is back in Alnwick. I’m pointed at a website…apparently it has a manager who is South African and is abysmally rude. Even better. He’s not out today. Must try again.

I could celebrate my 65th birthday here, book Planxty well ahead and sing my theme tune of the year….you know the one…….it’s so wonderfully anti-war and rebellious…

I had a first cousin called Arthur McBride
He and I took a stroll along the sea side….

I wonder if the guys in the SAS get to sing it, like while they’re out hunting chickens.

Just a thought.

Watts on for the winter... clothes off for the radio thief

What a wonderful day. Or should I say what a wonderful night. I went out like a light thanks to a can of Guinness by way of celebration. Well, not quite…. I think I would have slept like a log anyway.

See, I’d been out in the shed mid-evening on the turbo. This was for my first serious session doing intervals. It’s the moment of truth. When I really knuckle down to the winter I start with period of three weeks where I do the longer kind…..60-seconds a time

The shorter ones come later….the “on” time halves to 30sec….and next to 20sec….then 15sec…so every three-week period is more and more explosive.

Last winter I could just, but only just, hold my power over 60sec at 250watts. So I knew that figure would be under threat. But you have to try. It’s called battling against age.

So far, power over 60secs has held firm, past year on past year.

Some nimbies waffle on about feeling their age whenever they hit a birthday. Some rabbit on about it whenever we go into a New Year. People with hair (lucky people) count up their grey strands.

I buy none of all that. For me, my judgment day is when I get down to it on the turbo.

The good news is that…..my one-minute power is intact. Yes. I must phone and tell Uncle Festa. He, he….my fee for giving him lead-outs has gone up. Forget the money, Jim lad, I want to come home and find Tina Turner under my bed.

Did you read that…the dodgy guy who was sleeping down in a hole he’d cut out under a little girl’s mattress. And it went un-noticed for three months. I’m still in disbelief. I mean…. did he come in and out the bedroom window by some invisible hydraulic platform? Does HSS hire out some silent stealth model these days? What about stealth socks and stealth tooth-brushing?

However…but don’t you let on….. I now look under my bed in hope, since it is proven possible, but all I’ve got so far is David Icke and some ten-foot lizards (one night only), a Muslim Bedouin’s saluki dog (well I put it there myself so no surprise) and Twinkle-eye’s mother-in-law (asleep but smiling sweetly). But hey, I did take her to the bus stop in the morning.

The office is in turmoil. There’s this monstrous alert, like we’re having a tidy. Oh come on, we’re journalists. If there’s one word in the entire world that defies definition it has to be the word tidy. I carry memories of my daughter’s bedroom and use them as my own marker for being tidy.

The phone rang and I was invited round to play with Beth. She’s crawling and dribbling. She’s over 10 months old.

So I’m thinking back to my own mum. She used that last phrase last when I was about four.

Beth is a treat. My little China-man’s tuft of white hair on the end of my chin fascinates her. She tugs it. I can see it’s going to hurt when she gets a grip.

They say she can’t walk yet….but I found that by sticking a slice malt loaf on her each hand, she can climb up French windows. See, I’m instilling her with lots of vitamin R. Don’t worry, I was there to catch her.... and I did.

I can see an email coming from an anxious reader. Tintin….he’ll want to know what brand of malt loaf it was.

As well as an office a tidy, but a move-around looms. A re-shuffle, a new office layout. So who gets me?

Cleopatra perhaps. She’s giving me the needle for never writing about her. Meanwhile Nick is getting nervous. He’s instructed me not to say anything about him so I won’t. Aren’t some people strange.

The Speckled Hen has been on form. What a cackle-blitz. She ought to write a show-biz column.

Well see, she lives well west of Sutton, I mean out in exclusivity, that patch north of Leatherhead where you get sneaky forests and away-residences with their big-arched opening gates and security lights with power, ones that glare in your face.

The Speckled Hen waves to Mr I-Have-No-Face when he’s out with his dog. And who is he? Think footballer. Famous. Chelsea. Come on guess. Which of their players is completely grey-mist in their hall of fame, like his feature are constantly pixcelled out even when they're not? Arnjo Robbin. Excuse my spelling. I don’t buy Chelsea.

Out clubbing with an 18-year-old niece (could be worse than doing intervals) who had a birthday. Next up she’s giving her mother away. Twinkle-eye wishes to add his mother-in-law to the package.

Still no sign of Tina Turner, by the way. I just looked.

The Speckled Hen ran her grolly-trolly over the foot of some dolly in Marks & Spencer and I’m only vaguely on mind alert, but like when Edward Scissorhands hears that the dolly in question was Louise Redknapp he went into total slaver mode. She’s got ranking. She’s one of the 3000 pin-ups on his list.

Laura passed through the other day. She once worked here, next to Split-Pea. She was totally awesome at sneezing. She blew the end windows right out one morning. This is when we were still on the tenth floor. The publisher twice found himself suddenly sitting back-to-front….and that in his own little office. Split-pea wore a helmet.

Officially she bunked off with a golf professional to Ireland….but what I can tell you, though, is that she got hired by Ellen MacArthur on that round-the-world yacht trip she did, for back-up. Good job too. The boat was a full week down on schedule at one time. This is mid-ocean.

Then Laura got summoned to the scene and positioned on a well chunky trawler at a short distance to the rear. Then they put Laura into sneeze mode and the rest is history. I wish she’d come and watch me race. Strategically placed, I’d blow the hills away, interval training or not.

It’s wonderful how a third glass of red wine, imbibed in a warm room with lots of glowing people can induce the stories, the merriment. I wish I was a bon-viveur.

Well, my little story came from Polyblox Construction where I have this cycle-related link. And yes, she does intervals in case you are wondering.

Anyway the boyfriend in question moved jobs, from selling fire doors to this new post in Swindon. Being great at the marketing schpeeeel, he’s on a ladder marked “up” and is now selling fork-lift trucks.

He’s got these army mates, see, and they do drinking sessions. So they’re coming out and they get to catch this radio thief. Red-handed. In the car. Well, the police are going to be a total waste of time, so they all pile in with the guy and off they go.

After 150 miles, in a wet field, they get all his clothes off and let him out. I hope you’re not chuckling. It’s not PC.

Byeeeee.

Swarms of police for the horse-box parade

Here I am out on the bike, coaching with a group of riders and you wouldn’t believe the swarming that’s going on. This time it’s not us in that handlebar-to-handlebar training routine, but the police.

Yes we have the police swarming round us, all piled like sardines in inconspicuous-grade people-carrier vans….looking matt-coated and dull. No gloss.

But they’re no use to us. It’s like they want a riot to get stuck into….but there isn’t one and so they’re sitting round brewing cups of tea and clocking up overtime. I mean if they want to be useful why don’t they help us?

When it’s a cyclist or a cycling event that could do with some help, the police don’t want to know. Bizarre.

We are having a coaching session, numerous riders out on the public highway, split into several small groups. Totally ignored.

We’re in green countryside, going round little circuits close to our base which is the splendidly adequate village hall at Newchapel.

But these vans keep roaming past in an aimless fashion and then they stop. Bordering on being a nuisance to us really. How about seeing us safely round corners, guys?

What’s it all about? Has one of us stolen the world’s last packet of Spangles? Has one of us been identified as some secret myrtle jam importer?

No, and again no. They’re gobbling up tax payers' money because there is a hunt in progress. Well there might be as wherever there’s a roadside patch of grass there’s a parked horse box on it. Empty. Back-ramps all down.

Have you ever cycled behind a horse box? It’s like being in a gas chamber. Who exactly fakes these people’s MOTs? Someone somewhere is sure making a fortune out of dodgy paperwork.

How come the hunt/hunt saboteur stand-off can waste so many police man-hours when it’s only a sport, given that cycling gets told to scram when it wants similar help?

But enough of the through-and-off training on the flat-land. We regroup and hive off to a new circuit, to a lovely chunk of uphill. Not a mountain….but by racing standards it’s quite a testing bite-size little number.

Today’s Surrey League-related session (this one is all women) has some quite strong riders. “Get out the saddle and give it everything”, is the instruction from me.

Not exactly that it’s followed…a third of the riders do just that but too many stay sitting in the saddle.

They won’t come January – I’ll have a new weapon. I’m getting that saluki dog soon from the Muslim Bedouin who stopped hunting gazelle in the desert. No quarantine thanks to an illicit small-boat exchange out in the Channel, on the Godwin Sands in fact. Then in through a little cove near Littlehampton.

The dog is trained to snap heels, says the seller. I’m paying him in euros acquired from Uncle Festa. For today’s session, though, I need instant back-up so I ask a police marksman to help….there’s a restless one in a field over a gate taking pot-shots at squirrels and he’s doing quite well.

Couldn’t he splatter the tarmac behind the last rider’s back wheel, you know like you see in terrorist training camps. It looks like quite a gee-up on those clips on tv.

Tinitis is a constant noise splatter in my head. Always on the go. Wednesday in the office was much worse. I’d been hacking the keyboard for half the next story, splattering words onto print (metaphorically) when a movement caught my eye. It was Buttons outside the door with no security pass. She was stood hammering away with her fists and mouthing air.

So I let here in and ask a question. Hey, do you have this vision, like before the words have even left your mouth you already know the answer before it's come?

“ How did you get past the barriers down in the entrance then?” I asked? But I already knew.

“I hurdled them,” she says. Well, almost. One arm’s snapped right off, the other metal barrier iss bend double. Two security guys are still out there on the loose. I’m wondering …. can we expect to see Lady Penelope doing the same thing?. More pink scarf and limping?

Do they charge for these repairs out of our magazine’s budget? Another silly question.

Halfway through that coaching session I had shuddering realisation….like one of my 16 riders in the group is sister-in-law to the Welsh Woman. I visualised her with the red kites and chopped people-meat and the disappearing dice-up friends from Sutton. So I rode alongside her and was nice. Well by my standards.

The office rumour is that Split-Pea is to become a dad. The birth should trigger quite a punch-up. The last time the famous four, that's the parents and the in-laws, met up they had a right old set-too. It was in Las Vegas in the middle of Split-Pea's wedding. The vicar was laid out cold. I don't think they're actually even married.

So place your bets. The re-match live from Maternity Ward Six. Coming to you on YouTube. I’ve taken advertising rights.

Perhaps they should get the police in for that.

The office meercat is up again. Neck and eyes. Should I smile?

Red kites overhead and Spangles in Queslett

I’m looking at red kites. Not just one red kite but eight and I’ve been looking at them, like on and off, all day. And yesterday as well. Me, I’m stumbling into my 60s as you know, and I’ve never seen a red kite in my entire life before now….but here they are everywhere.

And for the first time I’ve remembered to set off with my boots and socks and rucksack….and the binoculars. So the kites look huge. Absolutely huge. All silent glide on an up-current, just the furthest feathers flickering slightly and turning up like fine fingers.

Before, I once watched this programme on the tv and there were 40 red kites on show. This was mid-Wales. But the whole thing was spoilt when it showed a woman walking into the middle of a field, tumbling squares of red meat into the grass and letting them all come piling in. To me that was a fraud, like factory farming meets wildlife.

What is less well known, and wasn’t said at the time, is that the squares of red meat were once people, like those who commented (unfavourably) on the Welsh Woman’s awful singing. So we’re talking Sutton residents and former colleagues.

I was only told that recently, but it explains a lot. Like people I know who are gone missing. You cut her up with your criticism and she dices you up with a cleaver. Perhaps as well she’s no longer filing my pink FT clippings.

These proper red kites are north of London, in the Chilterns. Daughter is on a mission to walk every long-distance trail before her teeth fall out/boots rot/joints seize. We chip in from time to time. Like when rain is forecast. I always take an umbrella. Some ramblers won’t walk with me.

Three Christmas’s ago I was a guest with Huddersfield Rucksack Club. “We’ve never had anyone with an umbrella,” said Duncan, he a stalward bootman for 50 years. I offered him the chance to disown me by walking 100m behind everyone. That calmed him down. He spoke to me at lunch.

Daughter is close to the end of The Ridgeway challenge. It’s a trail with lovely views and a fake history.

She had me stop to look at something not worth looking at…. King Alfred’s Cakes.

Black and round they were….and so well named. I instantly thought of my grade of toast. You know, similar colour. There they were, about three dozen of them all along a huge ash tree-slump that had broken off, so laid flat on the ground and starting to rot.

I had to sit down. Well, daughter explaining to dad what this fantastic black fungus can do. You don’t eat it, silly, you store it and dry it and light fires with it, rubbing two sticks together. Hey, I’m not Ray Mears. I get cold fingers and cold toes. But, but…..how does she know these things??

Boyfriend and she are suddenly experts, well near-experts, on fungi and things, edible and otherwise. They’ve asked me round for a treat only they want to see my will before we sit down. I’m suspicious.

Cycling is here, don’t worry, but it’s not up-front this week. Jane was on the phone, this is for a coaching session I’m doing on Sunday. I thought all this religious extremist stuff was another world from mine. Well, I live in Surrey.

But so does she. There’s these four kids at private school (not that I approve of private schools). So, the husband has moved more and more nutty. He once had a decent job. Not now. He’s gone so far beyond extreme he’s in a cult.

So he’s giving away big slices of cash, from time to time, to his leader. This is out of the joint account. She threatened a divorce. He said he’d want five of her wine stores. Bloody hell. She’s got 10, some in Wolverhampton, some in Bognor Regis. That’s her income, her ticket for life.

She’s somewhere I’d not want to be. I can see a solution which involves him being fed to red kites before too long. Hopefully not those lovely ones in the Chilterns.

Listen, in the whole of two days walking, we didn’t see a single rabbit. And I was a benefactor (not often you’ll hear that). Listen, this other rambler guy comes running up to us saying his wife can hardly walk because of blisters and new boots and can he have a plaster. Well no…but there’s some SecondSkin in my baggage. Somewhere. Ahhh, found them. He takes one.

Up the hill and I’m looking back through the binoculars and she’s giving us a thumbs up. We walk on. I slap the daughter for picking sloes and getting under the feet. I see a wild damson tree and stop to pick and eat. I get a slap, then another. Life is so unfair.

Polyblox Construction in Queslett, that’s in the sunny Birmingham conurbation if you didn’t know, have now done a survey of their existing workforce.

And?? 50% have grandchildren and 20% receive the government’s £200 winter heating allowance. More interestingly, five still drive Hillman Imps. The two who had Coronation Day mugs sold them on eBay during the past year (how sad)…..and one (wait for the big build-up) has a square metal box containing 320 flattened Spangles wrappers and two untouched packets. Can you believe that!!

The rumour-mill has it that Wates Construction is thinking of making a take-over bid, well that’s the word, so I need to act, to do a deal with Jonny swashbuckler with teeth Wates….like no nice write-up unless I get to meet with Spangles man and negotiate one-to-one.

Six King Alfred’s Cakes for one wrapper. Deal or no deal?

Ageing with Spangles, swarming with one-handed cyclists

What a week. Suddenly we have a banned list of words that can’t appear in job adverts any more. State-your-age is no more, it’s right out of the window, followed by descriptions…….

Youthful and recent graduate can’t feature. Experienced has gone, then a wadge of more words including energetic, vibrant, quick-learner and self-starter. Mmm…is that because we the old do have the above, or rather that we don’t.

I thought myself immune to this swell of total nonsense as more important issues swirl round, battling for my immediate time. Three Ghanaian cyclists want Dougie’s address for some visa scam involving a letter-of-permission and their High Commission. He’s organising a cycling event and this is what he gets. I need to keep him sweet as his love-lady Lorraine’s husband has a tip-off from a PFI conference in Poland. His phone is down.

And a Muslim Bedouin guy wants to sell me his dog, a saluki, as he’s stopped hunting gazelle in the desert. Plus a tent. Just the thing for marketing man, Johnny on-safari Wates. I might manage a decent mark-up when I see him next week.

And here’s this construction firm in Birmingham offered me a few bottles of red wine….Barolo so all the more tempting….to tidy up a form of questions that would help them circumvent, oops I mean conform, the give-us-your-age problem on future job application forms.

So if you apply for a job with Polyblox Construction in Queslett in the next few months and you recognise some of these, just stay calm. At least you know where they came from. Here we go……..

Q1 do you have children?
Q2 are they……pre-school…at school…at university…working
Q3 do you have grand-children?
Q4 how many years ago did you start losing your hair?
Q5 do you receive the government’ £200 winter heating allowance?
Q6 are you eligible for free prescriptions?
Q7 did you or your father fight in the Boer War
Q8 tick if you have owned any of the following…..Model-T Ford…Austin A40…Hillman Imp
Q9 were you given a free mug on Coronation Day in 1952?
Q10 do you remember Spangles.

And while we’re thinking about the latter - what the fxxx ever happened to them?? Did they get sucked into some black hole? Will they suddenly emerge from a time warp and make us happy?

The only good thing about getting old, when you’re among veterans doing races, is that every five years you go up into a new age-band. Notice that it’s up. Positive. So you do better against the older guys. It doesn’t last though…as the next year another fresh round of guys get promoted and you’re back to square one.

Do I show ageist attitudes? Well, you decide. Thanks to our recent move of office, we dropped five floors to a new set of windows, I’ve lost my trusty ruler….but acquired someone’s flash-drive. Overall….I think it’s a backward step, a poor deal, but I don’t know why. Probably because a ruler does useful things. Like underlining words. And it’s mighty good for slapping passing twits.

Rob Roy’s treading of carrot fields goes on. This weekend he was in the Beccles Marshes before sleeping under the stars overnight and then heading northwards for Lower Thurlton. He’s in line for a top place at the Carrot Awards Night, or so he says.

The Frinton town council put Twinkle-eye’s mother on a train for home, asleep but fully labelled. What curious concept that is. My mind starts to imagine her as a jar of chutney.

Nick is getting nervous. He’s instructed me not to say anything about him, so I won’t.

I did a whole day coaching on Sunday with a whole army of riders who want to take up racing. All women. Set up by Bex at SheCycles.com. We must have given them a hard time because during the lunch break they seemed to scoff everything in sight, like at least 80 brown parcel packs on a tray and stacked halfway to the roof marked alternately, meat or veg, plus whole cakes sliced in multitude, plus heaps of fruit.

Also in a naughty corner there was a dish with nothing but Kit Kats, the two-bar variety…one rider took three and looked sheepish.

She’d given her age as 55 on the forms so I thought she deserved a big smile and a break. If it hadn’t been an ageist thing to say, I’d have said she was remarkable taking up racing at that time of….

Lunch over and then another two sessions right through to close on 4pm. No wonder I slept like a log. I dreamt I was under a hedge somewhere in Norfolk with my faithful saluki laid at my side.

Annett came as helper. It was a good job as it was all hands on deck. All in all, we were two coaches and three helpers out there on the track. This was Hillingdon where you can get on tarmac on a private race circuit. Built for cyclists. Wonderful.

Riding in lines six-abreast at one time, we were, right arm out and hand on the next person’s shoulder on your right. Stay calm. Stay in line. Repeat only now to the left. Much harder. This is swarming, to give it its technical name. It was Mac’s idea.

At lunch a small girl spotted my scoffing chocolate biscuits. I was sitting in the sunshine at the end with a coffee and she reappeared with more, a virtual trayful. The day’s remnants. It was impolite to refuse so I scoffed a whole handful and she giggled and hived off, probably to tell her mum. So if you read this Helen, I only took four. Honestly.