Sports desk with Neasden Postlethwaite

[hirez]

Top tip: On your ride home, do not try to keep up with the cyclo-cross enthusiast on the Ti road bike when it is your first day back in the saddle after a month of lung-bugs and you are riding the hybrid with the panniers and the BFO U-lock.

Still, all good fun and gosh but doesn't the world smell nice? Damp earth, wild garlic, diesel, creosote, organophosphates, rusty steel... Hurrah for Sustrans and the Bristol-Bath cycle path.

Anyway. A random sort of conversation with mater (as if there were any other sort) brought to mind road accidents. When I was tiny, we used to live about equidistant from Winchcombe and Andoversford. Andoversford had a cattle market, a couple of pubs and Victory Mechanics, who were the local (Ford/New Holland) agricultural engineers. As a result, we'd go there fairly regularly.

You'll note from the Google link above that the section of A40 there is a dual carriageway. That's relatively recent. This is a pre-Beeching picture of the place.

Anyway, when the post-Beeching bypass was instantiated, there were no traffic lights on the A40/A436 junction, or indeed a haven for cars turning right off the A40 in either direction.

There were A Lot of messy road-accidents. Since this was before proper seatbelts, safety cells, decent brakes and paramedics, I suspect all the fire brigade could do would be collect the body parts, hose the blood off the road and then tow the twisted wreckage to the forecourt to Tubb's Garage. (bottom left in the second picture) Which as a small child I would goggle at from the Land-Rover, Renault 16 or Ford Corsair window. I don't remember what I thought about them. More than likely I would try to identify what the mangled heaps of tinwork had been. Were I more of a lying bastard than I already am, I'd claim some Ballardian coincidence and make out that I was trying to work out the relative trajectories of the vehicles involved. However I was five or six, indeed probably even younger.

I don't know where I'm going with this. ladymoonray jogged something related in the back of my head the other week, and I'm not even sure I'd thought about that other thing properly before then.

Strange business, life.

Comments

[aoakley.livejournal.com]

pre-Beeching picture

How the COCKING HELL did the trains manage to get up the hill from Dowdeswell to Andoversford? Did they decouple the damn things and winch them up on ratchets, or what?

[hirez.livejournal.com]

The clue's in the name: Tunnel Hill. If you follow the link under that picture, you'll find old photos of the viaduct that ran from the lower Dowdeswell turn on the A40. That then ran into Sandywell tunnel and thence to Andoversford.

[tails-redux.livejournal.com]

Couldn't see any wild garlic along the cyclepath on my travels t'other week ... so where can it be found within striking distance of the People's Republic of Easton?

[mattydesade.livejournal.com]

Yeah don't try racing lycra clad blokes when you're on a Brompton with dodgy chainring either.

My folks had a Renault 16, which they sold for one of the first Audi 100s in the country in about 1973. I recall looking into a mangled MG Midget in a garage on the A47 to Wisbech which had obviously hit something a lot bigger. I remember seeing a solitary shoe in the footwell and lots of blood. And yeah, I did try to identify mangled stuff...

[hirez.livejournal.com]

The path around Mangotsfield was, um, redolent.

[tails-redux.livejournal.com]

Righto, may take a look on Sunday.

[hirez.livejournal.com]

My vague ambition is to become the scruffy bugger that the lycra-clad can't keep up with. There'll always be someone quicker, but I think I can go a bit better than last year.

[jarkman.livejournal.com]

Can you get a Turbonique axle for that thing ?

[edwards.livejournal.com]

I won't recall when I was six/seven, but I definitely DID used to work out the trajectories of crashed cars, and try to work out what had caused smaller dents and damage too.

I may well have often been wrong, but the twisting of the metal and scuffed paint used to fasciate me in the same way that broken bones and torn flesh fascinate the people that devour real-operation films.

Next task for Birmingham is, in fact, to bring the bike down, organise myself a tilt-shift perspective control lens, and cycle around the canals and paths looking for STUFF. And possibly THINGS.

[hirez.livejournal.com]

That's the source of the JATO-car urban legend, surely.

Given I am one of the lycra-clad most of the time (It's a lot more comfortable and copes better with changing weather than a pair of jeans and a t-shirt), annoying the golf-club[1] types should be relatively easy. I need to get fit enough for the sportive in a couple of months. Everything else is a side benefit.


[1] If you recall the golf catalogues Lying about your house, they're the sort of people who'll buy monogrammed unobtanium putters that have been tested in a wind-tunnel 'because it'll help their game'. Ignoring the fact that most golfers are beyond help anyway, getting the physical bits right is going to be more use than a carbon-fibre bottle holder.

[silentq.livejournal.com]

cris changed jobs and is now bike commuting in the same general direction that I do. Earlier this week, fresh from a day of feeling like crap, I spotted him a couple of blocks ahead of me on the way home. I *tried* to catch him, but it didn't work so well. :)
He used to take pleasure from blowing past the unladen road bike riders on the bike path, while he was carting panniers full of grocery shopping, I look forward to reading about your adventures in a similar vein. :)

[hirez.livejournal.com]

I don't think I'll be quite that good. After all, yer man is seriously f-ing hardcore and has the badges and scars to prove it.

[silentq.livejournal.com]

He started slow, it's possible to get there with dedication! :) Or at least that's what I keep telling myself...
I'm finding that since I ride to work with huge panniers stuffed with crap, and often add in library books and grocery shopping, when I strip down the bike for pleasure rides, I go a *lot* faster than usual. Now I just need to work on my wind, commuting is so stop and go that I don't get a good cardio workout.