What a cracking weekend that was! The bruises and cuts are now fading, the pain and exhaustion now just hazy memories. 

A good bit of prep beforehand (see other blog) meant that it was just a question of driving there and getting on with it. Peter had hired a small van and it took a lot of mental and physical agility to get seven bikes and a load of baggage into it. I’m glad I watched the Krypton Factor as a child. I had to take my time over it, though. It’s one thing getting those bikes to fit in the back. But the skill is doing it so that they come out working at the end of it.

If we weren’t careful: 

(Pedals, handlebars, disc breaks and chains) + (Pete’s driving) + (Welsh roads) = EXPENSIVE SCRAP METAL

Shedloads of masking tape and corrigated cardboard did the trick, it seems. I’ll certainly remember that one for next time.

We’re off to Wales.

We’d talked about it. We’d talked all around it. Talk is cheap. Just like the cottage that we’re renting.

It was settled over a Sunday roast at Pete’s place. We decided not to dwell too much on it because the more we thought on, the more we’d come to realise that hurling ourselves down the Welsh mountainsides on a bike is not really a sane activity for a cold, wet winter weekend.

I know it’s going to hurt. It did the last time I did it a few years ago now, and that was when I was really fit. Fortunately, I don’t smoke and lead an active lifestyle so it should be a tolerable pain. After covering thirty-two miles this Sunday and being able to get up and walk with nothing than a slight case of jelly-legs, I’ll do fine. I hope the others can say the same.

Martin and I have been working on a new track. We’re not giving it out yet as it is a fair way off still from being finished, but get ready! Seany mumbled something into a microphone too, and somehow it’s still in the track, I just can’t seem to delete it. ) It sounds good though.

Often a track is crafted around a sample, and it is this sample which dictates how the finished product would sound. In our case, it was the other way around: Martin stumbled upon a spoken sample which seems like it was made to go in the breakdown.

This is the text of the spoken sample by a famous actor type called Quentin Crisp. God knows where my mate found it, but it’s pure gold! (It lasts a minute and a half, though.)

“I have been to restaurants in Soho whose denizens have crossed social and geographical barriers to reach them.

“In one I have seen a girl sitting amid musical pandemonium with a book open on her knees and her little finger entwined with that of her true love. Of course, she was not really listening, not really reading and not communicating with her friend in any way that required effort or style.

“It would be hard to say whether the jukebox caused the death of human speech, or whether music came to fill an already widening void. But, unless the music is stopped now, the human race, mumbling, snapping its fingers and twitching its hips, will sink back into an amoebic state where it will take a coagulation of hundreds of teenagers to make up a single unit of vital force, which, once formed, will only live on sedatives, consume itself on the terraces of football stadia, and die.”

Now if that isn’t a quote, I don’t know what is!