My first time trial

I'm not really a club sort of person - I'm much too shy and solitary in real life - and I'm certainly not a competitive person. So I've never
been in a cycle club before, and I've certainly never cycled
competitively. But a few weeks ago a cycling friend dropped by and told
me about a proposal for a new local cycling club, and a few days later
Janet at my LBS told me about it as well, so this time last week I went
along to an inaugural meeting at which about twenty people turned up.

At that meeting we agreed that to kick things off we'd do a club run
every Sunday, and a time trial every Wednesday evening as long as the
light held - which won't be long with the equinox approaching. On Sunday about twenty people turned up for a very pleasant run up round Balmaghie and Laurieston.

And tonight was the time trial. Juliette and I left the house together,
she on her Juliana and my on my Dolan. Juliette wasn't going to time
trial - she's even more unclubable than me - but we rode together out
to Douganhill through the most gorgeous evening, sun blazing through
every gap in the ridge, sky clear deep blue, wind more or less still.
At Douganhill Juliette pealed off, and I carried on. Within a few
hundred yards I saw another rider ahead, and so I started to chase -
not too seriously, because I didn't want to use up my legs too soon.
But coming past Barlochan I caught him, and it turned out to be someone
I'd met on Sunday whose name I don't yet know and we rode on together to
Craignair, where we found cyclists gathering in the quarry yard.

There was a wee bit of joshing and banter and a few photos taken, and
the Kelly Anne marshalled us all down to Butterhole road end for the
start. I was assigned to start eleventh out of thirteen. I watched
people start, learning the technique. Most people got clipped in at the
thirty second count, with Marcus holding the bike upright as Kelly Anne
counted down. I didn't feel confident about that... Then the tenth man was gone and it was my turn to go up to the line.

I said I'd just go from a standing start. To my surprise the adrenaline
was definitely going as Kelly Anne counted down 5... 4... 3... 2... 1... And we were rolling.

Typically I made a horrible start, missing my cleat not once but twice. But then I quickly wound up to a good roll, not pushing too hard because I didn't want to blow my legs up early. I don't yet have instrumentation on the Dolan so I couldn't tell my speed, but my aim was to settle at about 17 miles per hour, wait for the man behind me to
come past, and try to grab his wheel. Down the level leafy avenue past Munches and on towards Kirkennan everything felt to be going well. I felt I was making a reasonable speed, one I could sustain. And no-one had passed me yet.

By Kirkennan the road twists away up through a rocky defile to avoid the garden of the Big Hoose; and just as I clicked down a gear to climb through the defile there was a whoosh and a blur... Shit. Absolutely no way could I catch that wheel. Within two or three hundred yards he was a bend ahead of me and I knew wouldn't see him again. Never mind, I was expecting to be passed. Now there was only big Dougie behind me.

I knew big Dougie when we were lads; I wouldn't say I knew him that well, although I fancied his sister something rotten... but we're not that different in age, and he doesn't look like an athlete. However, he had turned up with the one bike which made my Dolan look second rate:
all carbon, all aero, Mavic carbon disk wheel, aggressively aero-rimmed front wheel.

Down past Barlochan, past Palnackie, and by then there was definitely a
rider behind me. Coming through the dips past Lochhill a vicious
whirring came up behind and I dropped two cogs and got out of the
saddle to sprint.

Some chance!

Dougie must have had at least five miles per hour on me, probably more.
He was pushing an impossibly tall gear with a cadence no more than two
thirds mine but he was belting along. But then we were into the long
Douganhill straights, over the flat coastal plain from Douganhill past
Potterland to the Gelston road end. I was keeping a good roll on, my
legs were feeling OK, breathing was OK, and Dougie was still visible
ahead. I started to pass riders coming the other way. Then the rise up
past Fred's, down past Screel Farm and the turning mark - Orchardton
road end. And there's big Dougie apparently chatting to the marshal!

I made my turn and accelerated back up the gentle rise to Fred's. As I
crested it that vicious whirring came by again, this time with less of
a speed advantage but I still didn't have the legs to stay with him.
And then there was - shall we say - a bit of a morale gap. I was now
last man on the road, and I'd burned my legs a bit trying to hold
Dougie's wheel. But fortunately I was on the long flat Douganhill
straights and I built my rhythm back. Coming through past Kirkennan
again, through the twisty lumpy section round the garden wall, my legs
were definitely hurting, and the Marshal's car coming past rubbed in
the fact that there was no-one else behind me. Still, my lungs were
working fine - I wasn't even breathing hard - and the bike was running
well. I used the downhill out of Kirkennan to get the speed back up to
a decent roll and pushed on down the last two miles. Now it didn't feel
too bad - my legs were working smoothly, they could do it, and the end
was in sight. My head stayed down for longer and longer periods, just
watching the chain pour through the front deraileur, my glances up less
frequent and shorter. The group on the road ahead started to resolve
into individual figures and there was still some left in my legs so it
was out of the saddle again and sprint, changing up a couple of gears
as the speed built. And then the awful feeling that I'd started the
sprint too early and my legs just couldn't do it and then I was across
the line, braking, doing a figure of eight turn across the road back to the finish line.

Later, in the quarry yard, Kelly Anne read out the results. There was a thirty five, some thirty twos, a couple of thirties, one twenty seven, and then...

"S Brooke, thirty one fifty one"

Wow! I was really surprised. I hadn't expected to come last, but I hadn't expected to average better than seventeen miles per hour, and 31:51 must be nearer nineteen. It's a lot faster than I knew I could
do, and makes a sub-thirty minute run an achievable target, which I didn't really think it ever would be. And what's even more surprising is I actually enjoyed it. Next Wednesday we're to wear light coloured
jerseys and have tail lights on our bikes. And next Wednesday I shall be there, in my light coloured jersey and with my tail light, seeing if I can edge a second or two faster.

And big Dougie? He did twenty five minutes. Despite a slow puncture and having stopped at the turn to check he wasn't knackering that beautiful disk wheel.

I make Amazon's top 1000!

I've been reviewing fiction for quite a while. I review books because, privately, I want to write them. So when I read a book, I try to analyse where the author succeeded and where the author failed, and in trying to analyse it I often write it down. It's a good exercise. It helps me to read with attention.

I used to have a little database system on this site which organised my review, and I may revive it one of these days; but while it's been down I've been posting the occasional review to Amazon - mostly, but not all, of books I've been impressed with.

And last night, browsing Amazon, I noticed that I've got the rank of 'Top 1000 reviewer'. It turns out to be absurdly easy to reach this rank; I've only posted 12 reviews. But I'm never the less pleased and not a little proud of my achievement.

Next goal? Top 500, of course. I suspect that may be just a little harder.

Oh, I completely give up!

Since 2001 I've used a standard stylesheet for my home page which has the navigation panel fixed to the right hand side of the browser so it doesn't scroll with the page but is always available. It's a nice trick. When I wrote this stylesheet, there were two browsers available which rendered it corectly. One was Konqueror, and the other was a late beta for Microsoft Internet Explorer 6.

That beta was really very, very good indeed. It correctly dealt with all the interesting test stylesheets I threw at it. So I was really frustrated and annoyed when the final version of Internet Explorer 6 - the one which actually got released - had a very broken CSS engine.

Now, three years later, most of the available browsers render my stylesheet correctly. Mozilla does, and consequently, so of course does Netscape, which uses Mozilla's rendering engine. Konqueror does, and consequently so does Safari, which uses Konqueror's rendering engine. Opera, naturally, does. But one browser notably does not: Internet Explorer.

And what is really irritating is it isn't because they can't. It isn't because poor ickle Microsoft don't have sufficiently skilled software people to manage it. Not only is Microsoft the biggest and richest software house on the planet, they have already done it - as the IE6 beta proved. They know how to do this. They choose not to.

For years I've put up with the fact that Microsoft's customers could not see my home page as I intended it. It shouldn't matter, of course, because my page is designed to degrade gracefully, so they get the full functionality even if it doesn't look as good as it could. But over the past couple of days I decided to work up a new stylesheet which would look good with every browser. I did away with the fixed right hand nav panel and instead floated it left. I kept the visuals simple and attempted just one visual trick: using a fixed background graphic for the body text, and a the inverse of that graphic as a fixed background for the sidebar.

On standards compliant browsers the result looks simple but elegant, and I was extremely pleased with it... until I tried it on Internet Explorer.

And Internet Explorer, of course, naturally, doesn't use the same graphic origin for the backgrounds of embedded elements as it does for the background of the page. And also it doesn't compute relative widths correctly. So the headers which in the new stylesheet should line up exactly with the edge of the sidebar don't do so. And the graphic, which should flow seamlessly from a positive image under the body to a negative image under the sidebar doesn't marry up correctly.

So why do Microsoft choose to distribute a broken browser? Is it because they think the World Wide Web is not important enough for them to bother with?

It could be, but frankly I don't think so.

I think it's another example of 'embrace and extend'. Microsoft, I think, hopes to force people either to code their pages and stylesheets twice - once for standards compliant browsers and once for Internet Explorer - or else put up with the fact that their pages are going to look pretty crummy either on Internet Explorer or on standards compliant browsers. Microsoft hopes also that naiive customers, looking at websites which are coded for Internet Explorer with other browsers, will assume it's the other browsers which are broken.

Allegedly Microsoft are now getting a little rattled by the success of the new Mozilla browsers. Allegedly they plan to do something about how far behind on technology Internet Explorer is getting. Allegedly there will be a new version out soon.

Perhaps this new version will fix Microsoft's broken rendering engine. Perhaps. I'm not holding my breath. And furthermore, I am not changing my stylesheet, either. If this page looks crap to you, just consider whether it's my fault. Or yours, for choosing to support a monopoly which is deliberately breaking standards.

#1 Road C

Dreaming

It was my partner who first drew my attention to Terry Dolan's bicycles. My partner inherited my sister's Raleigh Royale when my sister died; it's a thoroughly nice bike quite apart from the sentimental attachment, but it bears the scars of twenty two years and she was thinking of having it professionally repainted, so she went trawling round websites looking for people who could make a good job of repainting a precious bicycle.

Terry Dolan, among other things, paints bicycles. But he chiefly paints bicycles because he makes bicycles, and he makes some very nice bicycles indeed. The first time I looked at his site my attention was caught by his carbon monocoque frames, which look almost organic with their flowing curves. And ever since I'd had a sort of distant fantasy of having a new road bike built on one of those frames.

It was a distant fantasy, frankly, because my Number 1 Road Iron was (is) perfectly good, so I didn't actually need another road bike, and any money I did have for another bike was supposed to be going on a recumbent. So when the subject of 'what would be your dream roadbike be' came up in conversation I mentioned the Dolan monocoques, but that was really all there was to it.

Reality

Sometimes in the evenings I find myself sitting in front of my computer idly browsing the Web because I'm frankly too tired to go to bed. And on such an evening a couple of weeks ago I was idly browsing bike frames on eBay, frankly looking for interesting mountain bike frames. There was a link without a picture: 'EX DISPLAY DOLAN CARBON FRAME'. And I looked, and there it was: a Dolan frame, in my size, with no bids on it. It wasn't actually the frame I'd been seduced by on his website - slightly less swoopy and organic - but gorgeous, and if the price didn't rise much I could afford it.

I watched that auction obsessively, and for days there were no bids. 10 minutes before the end someone put in a bid which was just ten pounds over the start price. I waited until two minutes from the end and put on twice the start price... but the other bidder didn't bid again and I got the frame for just twenty pounds over the start price - a very good bargain indeed.

When I spoke to Dolan's they agreed to throw in a carbon wing fork for half retail price, which made it even more of a bargain. And two days later it was here.

The next decision was the groupset. I don't know if you, like me, spent hours as a broke young man gazing into bike shop windows at kit you could not possibly afford. I still have memories of utterly gorgeous chainsets and brakes which I lusted after painfully (yes, I know, sad). And the name on the box was almost always the same: Campagnolo. For me that was the ultimate aspirational brand. Consequently, I've been riding around with a Campagnolo logo on my jersey without having a scrap of real Campagnolo kit on my bike.

But it would be a crime to put inferior kit on a frame like this: Campagnolo it had to be. I phoned Oldham Cycle Centre (who'd been recommended to me as Campagnolo specialists, and I'd had good service from before) and ordered a Centaur groupset; after some agonising I ordered it without hubs, and ordered a set of prebuilt Mavic wheels. I wanted to get the bike ridable as soon as possible.

The Saga of the Headset

When I spoke to Oldham, I asked them about what headset to get. Their answer was unambiguous: get it from Dolan. So I phoned Dolan and asked what headset I needed. They said it was a Cane Creek integrated, but they didn't have any in stock. They recommended I phone a particular bike shop, who they had regular dealings with, and get it from them. So I phoned the shop and they said, ooh, no, don't get a Cane Creek, what you want is a Campagnolo. Well, as explained above, I'm predisposed to think that what I want is a Campagnolo, so I ordered it.

And on Wednesday of this week the headset arrived. Then the frame and forks arrived. And finally the groupset and wheels arrived. and I could start playing. Now, putting the crown race of a headset onto the forks is a specialist job, so I took it into my local bike shop, and Marcus the proprietor kindly fitted it for me. And I took it home and started to build up the bike... and it quite quickly became obvious that the headset was not going to fit, no way, no how. Panic. My partner looked up Cane Creek headsets on the Web, and found one called an S2. It was by this time five to five in the afternoon, and I rang Dolan's. Yes, they said, I definitely needed a Cane Creek. Is it an S2, I asked. Yes, the person said, that sounds familiar.

So I went over to Wiggle's site, where my partner had found it, and ordered an S2.

And then, in the middle of the night. I woke up with just one thought in my head: the picture on the website was wrong. The headset in the picture was the wrong shape to fit in the frame; it would not work. In the morning, further phoning revealed that the headset I needed was a Cane Creek IS2, and that none of the suppliers I usually use had one in stock. Google came to the rescue with a list of shops which listed the IS2 in their catalogues, so I rang them one by one; and one by one they said they had none in stock, but two said they had the IS6 - identical in size and shape but twice the price. Having run out of options I phoned one of these back to order an IS6. And the salesman at the other end said that since putting the phone down on my first call he'd had another look, and he did have an IS2. In one and an eighth inch, which I needed. In black, which I wanted. Bless you, I said, put it in the post.

So the next morning - yesterday morning - the headset arrived, and I was able to complete the bike. All up, including my old but comfortable Brooks saddle, it weighs just twenty one pounds. With a lighter saddle it would be under twenty. That's still quite a lot above the UCI limit, of course, but it's far and away the lightest bike I've had.

When I'd finished the build it was, of course, raining. But I had to go for a ride anyway.

Realisation

I've ridden so far only about fifty miles on it. It's not far. But it already tells me I've got something pretty wonderful. The frame first: it has the very short angles which I like, which make for a responsive and engaging ride. It is, essentially, designed to be a professional time trial frame. But at the same time carbon fibre is quite obviously far more compliant than aluminium - more compliant even than good Reynolds steel. It is just so comfortable. Very little roadshock gets though either to the bars or to the saddle. At the same time it accelerates easily and climbs well.

And the transmission is just so crisp. Every gear change is precise and immediate. I've never ridden a good road transmissions before, but it's far crisper than the high-end Shimano transmissions I have on my hill bikes. I'm very impressed. I'm impressed with the brakes, as well. I had thought until recently that road bike brakes were just fairly crap and you had to put up with it. But less than a month ago I upgraded my road bike to Centaur callipers, and I had been amazed by the difference. But when you team Campagnolo callipers with Campagnolo levers, the brakes are not merely very powerful but also very light. And last but not least, those levers. I've never ridden a road bike with integrated levers before, either; always before I've had downtube shifters. But the ergopower levers instantly felt natural and comfortable and easy to use.

A weirdly enjoyable afternoon

I was doing a bit of fettling on my new bike yesterday evening, and my neighbour came round and asked me for advice on fettling his bike.

It was a mess. Both deraileur cables had frayed under the bottom bracket, and the front one had snapped entirely. The deraileurs were caked in dirt and not working. The brakes weren't working. And the tyres were utterly perished - the worst I've ever seen on a bike.
The frame had minor cosmetic rust everywhere, but no obvious major rust.  He's a very good neighbour; I owe him a lot of favours.

So this afternoon I collected it and started to strip it, dismantling and cleaning virtually everything (I didn't strip the bottom bracket - it felt very good and given the time I had I thought best to leave alone).

It was weirdly like stripping and cleaning bikes I did when I was a lad - because it was in many ways very like the bikes we had in those days. Indeed, just stripping it was a journey of exploration and memory - and some surprises.

The rear deraileur was an indexed Shimano - but it didn't have a slant parallelogram. I had thought that slant parallelograms came before indexing, but obviously not. The brakes were also Shimano, single pivot callipers. They, too, were covered in filth, and the once-chromed nuts utterly rusty. But once upon a time they'd been quite nice callipers, with nice little release levers to slack the cable for getting tyres out. The frame had a label 'Reynolds 500' which I'd never heard of before -  but it doesn't look like a great frame; minimal lug-work and rather sturdy seat stays. The wheels are 700C, but with steel rims - again, I've never seen steel rimmed 700C before.

I couldn't get the cassette off, which was a nuisance because it made servicing the drive side bearing of the rear wheel decidedly tricky. But apart from that it all went pretty smoothly. I fitted all new cables, new tubes and tyres. I thoroughly cleaned and lubricated the deraileurs. I put it all back together and got the deraileurs set just so, so it changed crisply click, click, click. I put new bar tape on just to finish the job. I got the brakes working effectively, although as I haven't trued the back wheel and it isn't perfect they're not as good as I'd like.

It was utterly different from the maintenance I do on my own bikes these days - they are, by comparison, effete machines. And I utterly enjoyed every minute of it. And the best bit of all was not so much when I sent my neighbour off for a test ride and he came back saying it was really nice, but when I got in from my own ride later he came and chapped on the back door and said he'd just been out for another ride and really enjoyed it.

Review: Cannondale Jekyll 700

In the beginning: Lust and Longing

Long, long time ago, I can still remember when... I walked into Alan Dent's shop in Lancaster, and saw something beautiful. I knew about mountain bikes, of course; I even had one (and had shedloads of fun on it). Mountain bikes were crude, heavy gas pipe things with straight bars, wide gear ranges, tandem-style brakes, huge, knobbly tyres, and garish paint jobs. But what I saw that day was something different. Yes, it was a mountain bike, but in place of that crude, heavy gas pipe frame was an elegant confection of aluminium tubes, so cleanly welded you couldn't see the joins. In place of the garish paint job was plain, simple colour - a slightly muted green. In place of fancy graphics was a simple makers name in a simple bold sans-serif font: cannondale. It oozed quality. It begged to be ridden. But - it cost an arm and a leg, and I needed all mine for riding.

In due course, as happens in Lancaster, both my bikes - my hill bike and my beautiful custom framed road bike - were stolen, and I went down to Alan's shop to get myself a new one. The Cannondales were still there and I still lusted after one, but there was no way I could afford one and I walked out with a Scott Sawtooth, a huge, heavy, ungainly gas pipe contraption in swamp-monster-vomit green with purple and shocking pink banding - but at a third of the price.

It's not that I didn't like the Scott. It's not that I don't like the Scott - I've had it for fourteen years now, and it's taken me many thousands of miles - across floating bogs, up to the peaks of mountains, through literally pathless bits of wilderness, and down hundreds of forest tracks and paths. It's a lovely bike to ride; I still have it, and I still ride it for choice; but not very often any more, because this year I bought my Cannondale.

Every time I have to go up to Edinburgh I allow myself an hour extra to go and visit Edinburgh Bicycle Co-op. All bike shops are good, but the co-op is one of my favourites, partly because I knew the people who founded it, partly because I identify with politics but, mostly because it s'a big spacious its place full of goodies, where you have plenty of room to see the goodies. And it's mostly there that I have watched the Cannondale marque develop. Front suspension came first. I appreciated the engineering of the fatty fork - a single suspension unit on the axis of the suspension travel, highly resistant to twist and allowing the fork legs to be strong and rigid against flex. So much better thought out than the systems with twin suspension units mounted at the ends of stansions which were poorly supported at their upper ends. I watched the development of the Y frame, and its eventual demise in favour of the more elegant Jekyll. I watched, and I admired, and I lusted.

But still, I didn't need another bike, I didn't need suspension, and I couldn't afford a Cannondale. So I'd buy some little bit of jewelry for the Scott, and go home again.

It was on a visit to the co-op last spring that I first actually saw a Lefty. It was such an outrageous piece of engineering that I was immediately intrigued. I saw what the designer was seeking to achieve: the single, large diameter stansion would be so much stiffer than a pair of smaller ones, but could at the same time be lighter. It just struck me as so elegant and at the same time so jaw-droppingly radical. The build quality of the bikes was as good as it had always been - no pigeon shit welds on a Cannondale, unlike most other aluminium bikes; the designs still as clean and elegant. The aura of fine engineering, of quality, still hung about them, even if the beautiful glossy paint work was now slightly marred by irrelevant stickers. The only slight problem is that the price was still scarily high.

But the itch was under my skin: I wanted one. The choice, then, was between the hardtail F800 and the full suspension Jekyll (yes, I know I could also have had a Scalpel but frankly it didn't appeal for aesthetic reasons). I'd never actually ridden a mountain bike with suspension - with any suspension at all - so I hadn't really anything to go on to make my decision. Friends I knew who'd ridden full suspension bikes had said that they were great fun down hill, maybe not so good on the climbs. And heavy.

But the thing was, not for me they weren't. The Jekyll would weigh, all up, about 27lbs. What a terrible thing! My Scott, which I was used to, weighed 31. So the weight didn't feel like a big issue - although I knew lighter was better. But full suspension intrigued me; and slowly the feeling coalesced. I wanted a Jekyll.

First Love

I suppose I must have been a boring nuisance agonising over them through the summer, because finally one morning my long suffering partner asked why I didn't just get one then? I phoned the co-op then and there and said I was interested in a large Jekyll 700 in black, and the person who took my call said they just happened to have such a beast in stock. Two hours and a hundred and four miles of driving later I was sitting on it, riding across the gentle lumps and hollows of - cycling strictly verboten - Bruntsfield links. In a sense it was ludicrous. I'd never even sat on a full suspension bike before, and a neatly coiffured inner city parkland is scarcely a test of seventeen hundred pounds worth of cross country machine. But instantly it was a gas. The bike felt lighter than my Scott. It felt more responsive. It felt more fun. And I was confident I could cope with the suspension. I bullied the poor salesman into giving up his lunchtime to getting the bike through its pre-delivery checks that day (it was, fortunately, already built up) pleading my hundred mile drive. I (of course - this was Edinburgh) picked up a parking ticket waiting around for it to be finished. I loaded it onto the back of the truck and drove home.

The next day at Dalbeattie one thing was immediately obvious. I was faster - quite a lot faster - than I'd ever been before. I was faster downhill, which I'd sort of expected (or at least hoped). But what I hadn't expected was that I was also - and equally - faster on the climbs. This was mostly good, although it caused some ructions in the household and ultimately led to the Jekyll not being - by quite a long way - the most expensive bike under this roof, but that's another story. The bike was better than even I'd expected, and I was enjoying it more.

In fact the first month or so of Jekyll ownership was pretty much unalloyed bliss. Oh - the saddle (a Fizik Nicene) was awful, at least for my anatomy. It was replaced within a fortnight with a Brooks Professional, which I always find comfortable. And, as supplied, the remote rear lockout cable ran into the front of the suspension unit, fouling the upper (and only really useful) bottle cage. However, the documentation which came with the bike showed the remote rear lockout cable running in from the rear of the suspension unit, so I made up a new longer cable and turned the lockout mechanism round, and that cured that.

But apart from these little things the bike was just great: I was going faster, having more fun, and sailing cleanly through places I hadn't been able to ride previously. I remember one ride in particular: after a frustrating day at work I took the bike out and just blasted up the hill behind the house to the two hundred metre contour; up out of the valley farmland, up through the steeply climbing woods, out onto the high moorland of Bengairn's long shoulder. And then I turned round and blasted down again, down the track, down through the hairpins, lumps of rock spitting and jumping out from under the tyres. I remember thinking, OK, this is when you soften the front damping, taking my hand off the jumping and shuddering handlebar and turning the dial on the top of the leg as far as it would go to the soft end, feeling the difference at once.

I remember powering down the track through the wood. I remember making a balls-up of one corner, losing my line completely, knowing I was going to run out of track and then the oh-oh, this is going to hurt moment. I remember that wonderful leg coping, soaking up the huge bang of the edge of the track, carrying me through, allowing me to pull the line back, to recover, to hurl the bike into the next bend and the next, leaping over boulders, hurling smaller rocks aside, burning off the frustration of the day.

The Morning After

And then, the niggles. Once you'd got used to it being so good, you started to fret about how it should be better. The thing that niggled first was climbing steep loose stuff. The bike had even wider gears than anything I'd ever ridden before, and the lowest ones seemed stupidly low. But when I came to a steep loose bank, I just lost traction. I tried it with the rear shock locked; I tried it with the rear shock active; but I still couldn't get traction. I blamed the bike.

The Scott, with it's ancient Biopace set up, actually did this better, or so it seemed. I even thought seriously of getting a Biopace crankset for the Jekyll.

And the Lefty - that glorious piece of outrageous engineering that I had so much wanted - didn't seem to like steep climbs either. It would pant and wheeze like an asthmatic as I struggled up them. The lack of front lockout seemed such a loss. I felt I'd bought the wrong bike, that I should have forked out the extra money for the 1000 with the DLR Lefty and front lockout.

The downhills, too, had their problems. Of course you're out of the saddle most of the time on a downhill. But if you hit a bump too hard when you were in the saddle, the single bolt Ritchey seatpost which was supplied with the bike would slip. No matter how much you tightened it, just when you least wanted it your saddle would be pointing at the sky. Also, to get comfortable on the bike, I found I had the seatpost just on the safe limit mark, and I actually wanted it higher. The fact that the downhills I was riding were both faster and more difficult than I'd ever done before sort of slipped past me in my frustration.

Finally, the tyres which came with the bike, Hutchinson Scorpions, didn't seem to like any surface I tried them on. They didn't like mud. They didn't like loose gravel. They didn't like wet roots. They didn't much like bare rock, and they definitely didn't like tarmac. And if you so much as showed them a hawthorn bush they'd break out spontaneously in a rash of punctures.

Altogether, I felt a little out of love with the bike, a little disappointed. I even wondered whether I had got the right size, whether I should actually have gone for an extra large.

The Sinner Repenteth

And then gradually I realised I was trying to apply skills I'd learnt in years of riding a rigid bike to a completely different machine, and it wasn't going to work. I actually needed to adapt my technique to get the best out of the bike. Facing a steep loose bank, instead of getting out of the saddle and stomping, as I was used to, I tried staying sat down and spinning. And it worked like magic. Suddenly I saw what those apparently absurdly low gears were for: to allow you to spin up ridiculous gradients. Because you were spinning you weren't pumping the bike forward in irregular spurts, and the bike didn't break traction. Also, of course, just as you weren't pumping it forwards, so you weren't pumping it up and down. It didn't bob; the Lefty didn't pant; the remote rear lockout, which I had thought such a wonderful feature when I'd bought the bike, revealed itself to be more or less irrelevant - indeed, I've now removed the remote lockout lever and now only use lockout when going fast on flat, smooth surfaces.

There's a side benefit of this. When I got the Jekyll I could not ride it no hands - a thing which very much surprised me, because I've never before had a bike I couldn't ride no hands, and on the whole mountain bikes with their slacker angles are easier to 'no hands' than road bikes. It would persistently pull left, although not enough to upset you when riding normally. I put this down to the lefty. After all, in the folklore (the folklore that also believes against all the evidence that aluminium bikes 'crack and fail'), lefties are supposed to pull left, so I just believed the folklore. As soon as the cable for the remote lockout was removed, however, the bike was easy to ride no hands - it had been the spring in the lockout cable that had been upsetting its balance.

Two small changes helped in my change of understanding about the bike. With advice from Rik of Rik's Bike Shed I changed the seatpost for a longer, two bolt one. Saddle troubles are now a thing of the past. And also from Rik, I bought a pair of Velociraptor tyres, the modern equivalent of the Panaracer Smoke/Dart setup that I learned to love on my Scott. The Velociraptors love every surface the Scorpions hated, with the exception of wet roots. They're a bit heavier and I think they're maybe a teansie bit slower, but I'll forgive them that for their excellent grip.

Conclusion

I've had the Jekyll a year now. The paintwork isn't quite to pristine, with small scratches where I've fallen on rocky ground, and from rubbing on the car rack. Otherwise, it's good as new. I've changed some stuff - most of which I've detailed above, but here's the list:

• Saddle: the fizik nicene just didn't suit me; now it's a Brooks Professional, which is all day comfortable (later changed to a Selle Italia SLR, which is equally comfortable but one fifth the weight).
• Seatpost: The Ritchey single bolt post wasn't quite long enough and kept slipping. Replaced with a BBB two bolt, which is long enough and doesn't slip (later changed to a USE Alien which is lighter and also doesn't slip).
• Bar Bag: Added a KlikFix mount for a Carradice Super C bar bag, the same one I use on all my bikes (now removed).
• Bar Ends: Added Cane Creek Ergo bar ends - very nice indeed (I've also, over the years, cut about four inches off the length of the handlebars).
• Remote Rear Lockout lever and cable: gone, not lamented.
• Stem: replaced with a slightly longer one, otherwise identical - improves my fit on the bike.
• Bottle cages: two. What more need I say?
• Pedals: replaced with Time ATAC, which shed mud better than SPDs.

There's still some stuff I may change. I'd like to upgrade the Lefty, and one of these days I may do so. I had a cycle computer bodged on for a while, but the bodge failed - fitting a computer pickup to a lefty isn't easy. There's a swiss firm who make an adaptor, but it doesn't really look any better a bodge than my own. This does need more thought because I would like the computer back.

So, is it as good a bike as I thought it would be?

Well, firstly, yes it is as good a bike as I'd hoped, and I'm enjoying it as much as I'd hoped. It's made me think much more analytically about my mountain biking; it's allowed me to do things which previously I couldn't have done; it's encouraged me to ride much more - and to ride much more difficult sections - than before. A few nights ago, soloing in the dark through a twisty bit of red route singletrack, I had the sudden feeling that the Jekyll had come with a whole pack of 'get out of jail free' cards: it allows me to get away with things which I otherwise could not. It is quite simply the nicest bike, and probably the nicest physical object of any kind, that I've ever owned.

Furthermore, the 'all mountain' marketing tag means exactly what it says. In a period when mountain bikes are getting more specialised the Jekyll is still a go anywhere, do anything bike, as happy with climbing up hills as blasting down, as happy with tight twisting singletrack as with broader, easier trails.

Secondly, would I advise anyone else to buy the same model? The answer is no. The Lefty is a great concept; the bottom of the range Lefty Jake, which is what you get on the Jekyll 700, is slightly flawed execution. It is worth paying a little extra, not particularly for the lockout which three months ago I would have told you it desperately needed, but for more adjustability (I have since bought a DLR Lefty, and it is a considerable improvement).

Also, the Lefty is quite complex and appears to need quite a lot of complicated maintenance. In theory you're supposed to take it into a Cannondale dealer every forty hours for a strip and rebuild, and there's simply no way I can afford to take a day off work every month to drive the bike up to Edinburgh (or down to Keswick), sit twiddling my thumbs all day, and bring it home again - quite apart from what it would cost every month. So I'm just keeping it well lubricated, making sure it gets properly dried after wet rides, and frankly hoping for the best. And, to be fair, it's stood up to a year's moderately intensive use very well, and is still as buttery smooth and forgiving as it was on day one.

Epilogue

Cannondale's 2005 model range is out, and the Jekyll is retained only at the very bottom of the 'all mountain' model range. The bike which replaces it, the Prophet, is in many ways a logical development of the Jekyll.

Like the Jekyll, it has a single pivot rear swing arm pivoting in line with the top of the middle chainring. The front triangle is considerably simpler, lacking the adjustable geometry of the Jekyll and the rather complex basket of tubes that required. Suspension travel at both ends is longer, too.

Do I plan to get one? No. My Jekyll is doing me just fine.

Grin factor nine

It's the middle of the sailing season, and I've got a lot of work on,
and I've also been doing stuff to the house. And the consequence of all
that is I haven't had much time to take a bike up a hill for a while. When I've got on a bike it's been to nip into town or to nip round to see someone, so it's been my road bike.

This evening, after work, I took the Cannondale out and just blasted up Bengairn to the 200metre contour and back down to sea level. And it reminded me why I love that bike so much. 200 metres of climb in under 3 kilometres of track, and it just blasts up - the only time I put a foot down was on a short crest where the track was rising so steeply I couldn't keep the front wheel on the ground. Then, at Forest Hill, turn round, spend five minutes drinking in the glowing post sunset view out over the sea towards the cardboard cutout mountains of England and the Isle of Man. And then blast down the track again, feeling the bike do its magic carpet thing over stones as big as my skull, riding as steady and as comfortable as a road bike on smooth tarmac. Hurling down through the hairpins to the gate, and when the brakes are needed - no fuss, no anxiety, no worry, no noise, just smooth sure-footed stopping.

Through the gate and blast down through the wood, in and out of shadow too quick for eyes to adjust, the track at times no more than a dim grey snake through the trees. And not slowing down because there didn't feel to be any need to slow down - knowing for certain the bike could cope with far more than this track could throw at it.

Total blast. Total fun. Total grin.

I mean, road bikes are fun too... but nothing beats that. I love that bike.

A Journey to the Bottom of the Sea

Over the course of this year I've been hearing about audaxes and thinking about trying one. Finally, one came up which was reasonably near home and a manageable distance: 114 kilometres. I took my twelve-year-old Raleigh Record Sprint, which is not really a very good bike in a lot of ways but is fast and comfortable for long distances. It was pretty much standard apart from a Brooks saddle and Shimano SPD-R pedals.

An Inauspicious Start

Start was at Coldingham Beach at 9.00am. I arrived at 8.30, unpacked
my bike from the car, assembled it (carefully, I thought), walked
over to the control table and signed my name on the sheet. Sitting on
the grass by the control table was someone with a long black ponytail
who was clearly Jon Senior, so I greeted him and we chatted a little
and then I started organising my gear - again, carefully, as I
thought. Finally nine o'clock rolled round, and Bruce Lees (the
organiser) said his bit, and the whole bunch - about twenty five
bikes, including one tandem - set off. Up the first hill was fine.

As soon as we started the descent the back of my bike started making
seriously unhappy noises - noises that sounded like an imminently
failing rear wheel bearing. I stopped, got off, and messed, and Jon
stopped to offer support. I couldn't see anything (apart from a
sticky rear brake caliper, which I knew about) wrong. After a bit of
fiddling we set off again. By now the peloton was out of sight. I was
pretty doubtful about my fitness to complete seventy-five miles, and
really didn't want to be dropped - I wanted to stay with the bunch
for the morale advantages that offers. So I sprinted for a mile or
so, until I'd caught the rear of the peloton. And then I noticed Jon
wasn't with me, so I eased up, and he still wasn't with me, so I
circled back. I found Jon with a broken front deraileur - the bolt
holding the band had pulled out (Shimano 105: cheese, or possibly,
given its provenance, tofu). Jon screwed the bolt back in and we
continued on a mile or so, by which time I had become aware that my
computer wasn't working... because I'd put my front wheel in back to
front, so the magnet wasn't on the same side as the pickup. And I
hadn't got my mitts on.

Jon's front deraileur band failed a second time and I used the
opportunity while he took it off to turn my front wheel round. From
this point on my computer was working, athough I had to add five
miles to the distance it showed to get our true distance. We set off
again, by now a long way behind the main pack. Jon navigated, and I
was glad to let him. We carried on at my best pace (which was clearly
less than Jon's) for some miles until we caught up with another
straggler. I told Jon to go on and not wait for me, and for some time
I and the straggler (a serious looking cyclist with a good audax
bike, but looking ten years older than me) carried on together for
some miles. As we crossed the Tweed on an old suspension bridge she
said to me to go on ahead, and I did so, arriving at the village of
Horncliffe.

Before leaving home I'd printed out the route sheet (which had been
emailed to me) several point sizes bigger than the official one so
that I could read it without reading glasses, and I'd tucked it into
my map slieve behind the map I'd printed out and marked as best I
could. Here, though, the map was ambiguous, so I looked behind it for
the crib sheet... and it wasn't there. I remembered I'd tucked the
hotel booking in with it and I assume I'd pulled it out there and
then left it. Panic! The straggler caught up with me, and, as we
consulted her sheet, Jon (who had taken a wrong turning and got lost)
caught up with us too. We went on, and I stayed with Jon, cycling
through gently rolling countryside towards our first control point at
Etal. At Etal we found that we were not, after all, last - three
riders were still awaited. I was given a new route sheet, but found
that, without reading glasses (which I'd purposely not brought) I
couldn't really read it.

This was the point at which a sensible person would have given up. I
couldn't read the directions, I had an undiagnosed but serious
sounding mechanical problem with the bike (and suspected it was the
drive side rear wheel bearing), and I was clearly not fit enough to
stay with the main group. However, we'd done OK so far, and so I
decided to carry on at least until the next control.

A Senior Moment

At this point I should stop and say what an excellent riding companion
Jon Senior was. I had never met him before. He was a lot fitter than
me and climbed much better - he could easily have left me on any of
the climbs, and probably on the flat. He waited for me again and
again when he could have gone on with other riders. And he took the
full burden of navigation. Of course I physically could have
completed the course without him. But I would not have. By myself, my
morale would not have been good enough, particularly in the last
twenty miles, when I suspect I was probably pretty whiney and not at
all good company. Jon stuck with me, and I'm very grateful to him.

Straight On at Crossroads

The next few miles from Etal were very pleasant riding. The wind,
which was clearly sturdy, was at first a crosswind and then
increasingly a following wind, and the terrain, although rolling,
tended downhill. Soon we crossed a ridge and could see causeway to
Lindisfarne ahead of us. The minor road we were on descended fairly
steeply towards it, and the wind was helping us down at a good 35
mph.

The next guidance on the cribsheet was 'SO at Xrds'.

Well, I knew my brakes were pretty much crap. They're old Weinmann
single pivot calipers, and the return spring on the rear caliper has
lost most of its spring. I had been planning to treat myself to a
really good set of new brakes for the trip, but it hadn't happened.
And anyway, there was probably some flat land at the bottom of the
hill to slow down. And anyway, a crossroads, 50-50 chance we'll have
right of way, and if we don't, these little country roads don't have
much taffic on them...

Hang on, that's the A1!

I found that my brakes were a little better than I had thought they
were, if you really try. Across the A1, across a level crossing
over the East Coast Main Line, and out onto the sandy, open littoral.
By this time it was clear that our tailwind is really sturdy. We tore
down the road and out across the bottom of the sea at a steady, easy
27mph - on the dead flat. The surface on the causeway itself - which
I'd been anxious about, since the tide sweeps across it twice a day -
was excellent. Across onto the island, and the wind still with us we
continued to tear along. Now we met the leaders of our audax heading
back, and exchanged greetings. At the post office we had our brevet
cards stamped again, and I asked Jon what he planned to do. We agreed
we'd head back more or less straight away.

Blow Wind and Crack Your Cheeks

Well, we knew we had a wind to face. Out across the island towards the
causeway I worked downwards through all the gears I'd got, one at a
time, until I was in my lowest (which, at 42x21, is still 56" so not
very low), and the speed was down to under 10 mph. On the causeway it
was clean, laminar wind, very steady; but blowing at least force
five. It was frankly a battle. Ahead was a yellow jacket, which we
were gradually chasing down. Finally we caught up to a much older
rider on an old but good tourer, exchanged a few words, and passed
him. Back across the railway, back across the A1, and back up that
long hill into the teeth of the wind.

It felt like too much. It felt like I couldn't do it. The old
gentleman on the tourer passed us, and before long the newspaper that
had been in his saddlebag came drifting back to us one sheet at a
time, as if he was throwing out ballast. As the hill steepened Jon
was creeping away from me. Finally I cracked. I could not do it. I
got off and pushed up to the top. And at the top, Jon was again
waiting, cheering me up and urging me on.

At each bend the wind seemed to move with us, making each turn of the
pedals a struggle. Even the downhills were hard work. We reached the
50 mile point, and I was very much aware that my legs were now in
uncharted territory - I hadn't ridden so far in one go for at least
ten years. But mostly I felt OK. I wasn't feeling too tired, and,
apart from one thing I'll come to in a minute, I wasn't really sore.
I was, however, aware that I was slowing Jon down quite a lot, and
that I should tell him to go on - and also aware that if he did I
would probably give up.

Yo' Feet's too big

The real problem that was sapping my morale was a very painful left
foot. I have short but wide feet. I had only one pair of cycling
shoes which are extremely comfortable - my winter SIDIs. But the
weather forecast was for sun and gentle winds, and I'd assumed they'd
be too warm. So, in Edinburgh on Friday, I'd gone to look for a pair
of summer shoes which would fit. The only pair I could find that were comfortable were a
beautiful pair of don't-look-at-the-price SIDIs. But they didn't have
an adaptor for ordinary SPDs, so I'd had to buy a pair of pedals as
well (I bought SPD-Rs, mainly because they were cheaper than any of
the other pedals which would do, and the bill was looking very
scarey).

Obviously it isn't sensible to go for a long ride with new shoes and
an unfamiliar cleat system, but...

At about fifty miles my left foot was really hurting - very painful
indeed. Eventually at an information control I got off the bike, sat
down and took my shoe off. For five minutes I wiggled my toes in
bliss, and then faced the issue of putting it back on again. I
loosened off the ratchets, slipped my foot in, and... comfort. I'd
obviously just overtightened it before. We rattled down into Berwick
and caught up with some other riders at the control there, and things
started to look brighter. But then the route took us inland again,
once more climbing steadily into the wind. As we came to the A1 the
routing instructions were ambiguous. Jon and I got lost, and then
just about caught the tail of the bunch at the crossing of the A1.
From the A1 the route climbed on, and Jon was keeping with the group.
I couldn't. Once more I was being dropped.

I must go down to the seas today

I struggled on up the hill, and at the top Jon was waiting again. I
was getting slower and slower on the climbs, and recovering slower
and slower at the tops of them, still fighting into the wind. Finally
the route turned from northwest to northeast, and we started to
descend again towards the coast, and once again the wind was with us.
I didn't exactly feel tired, and I wasn't any longer uncomfortable,
but my legs seemed to have lost their ability to clear lactic acid.
Fortunately the climbs got fewer and shorter and the descents longer.
Eventually we descended through Coldingham village, down to the
beach, took our shoes off and wiggled our toes in the sand.

At the end we didn't do badly. We finished at 4, seven hours on the
road. It was an hour longer than I'd hoped. We averaged 12.1 miles an
hour while we were rolling, and 10.7 mph (17.2km/h) over all. That's
not a good time for an audax, of course, but even the experienced
audaxers had found the wind tough going. Control was, I believe, still waiting
for another twelve riders (out of about 25 starters) when we loaded
the bikes into the truck and left. So that counts as mid-table
respectability.

I did enjoy most of it and I'm glad I did it. It was much tougher than
I expected, and I'm not certain I'll do it again. Certainly not
without a good riding companion, and probably not without knowing the
route.

Lessons learned? Prepare. Jon and I were the only first-timers and the
only people (so far as I know) to suffer mechanical problems. My
mysterious noise appears to be something to do with a mis-adjusted
front deraileur; in addition the cable clamp bolt on my rear
deraileur was slipping through the day, but fortunately not so far
that I couldn't select all gears and the joy of non-indexed
deraileurs is they don't go out of indexing. My front inner tube also
had a slow leak which necessitated three or four pumping stops,
although I was able to do all but one of these at controls. Finally,
doing an audax on a bike which is really not set up for climbing was
a mistake. I should have fitted much wider range gears.

Fixing the holes in Sun's APIs

   
      I've spent another week fixing a lacuna in one of Sun's APIs - in this
      case, the fact that JDBC lacks a database neutral means of manipulating
      user accounts.
   
   
      Unlike MaybeUpload and the Servlet API, JDBCUserKluge is not even nearly
      seamless to use for users of JDBC API. It's written very much as an
      integral part of Jacquard. It's something I've known I had to do for -
      literally - years, and which I've been putting off because I knew it
      would be hard. And now I've done it.
   
 

Happiness is a Filthy Bicycle

It's been one of those weekends. Saturday the weather was too horrible
to go sailing, so in the end I worked all morning and half the
afternoon. And then the weather was still horrible so I stated playing
a computer game, as you do. And, as you do, I went on playing it late
into the night (and then it crashed just as I was about to achieve
something), and the consequence of that was I overslept my tide this
morning. Although in all probability I'd have got down to the marina,
looked at the weather and thought, nah... It was gey dreich. So I was
determined to get a bike out but what with one thing and another the
day was getting by. Finally about four o'clock I stuck the Mantra on
the back of the truck and headed up country.

I left the truck at Stroan Loch and cycled up the Raiders' Road. The
wind, which had been easily force six down on the coast, was pretty
blustery out of the west but not too bad because it was at right angles
to my direction. By the time I got to the Otter Pool it was raining
quite sturdily, so I stopped, peeled off my jersey and pulled on my
waterproof. Then on up the Raider's Road. I've cycled it before; it's
an interesting but not altogether pleasant surface to ride on being
essentially a dirt road but much better graded than most dirt roads, so
the surface finish where it hasn't been chewed up is almost as smooth
as tarmac. Unfortunately it had been chewed up a bit by the Galloway
Hills Rally which was through there a couple of weeks ago... It's a
filthy surface, though, and the bike was covered in a fine dark grey
grit.

You're also climbing steadily but noticeably along the whole length of
the Raiders' Road, mostly running close alongside the Black Water. And
it's pretty scenic. The Black Water is gorgeous, particularly in the
long sections where it runs over beds of flat rock. Towards the
Clatteringshaws end the road swings away from the water quite steeply
up the hillside, and as the sun had now come out (the weather improved
steadily) I stopped at the top to change my waterproof back for my
jersey. Then a blast back down almost to river level and another short
climb and I turned left onto the tarmac of the A712... for all of fifty
yards. And then left again onto the track up to Loch Grannoch, which is
signposted as part of NCN7.

Somewhere in Galloway this summer there is an osprey nesting. The RSPB
are, very carefully, not saying where. It's probably on one of the
really inaccessible lochs up in upper Galloway, but short of going into
serious wilderness the most remote lochs are Loch Grannoch and Loch
Skerrow, so I was half hoping to see one. Unfortunately you see very
little of Loch Grannoch because of the trees, although in one section
of clear fell there was a marvelous view out over it. It's typical of
Galloway, really. Here's a loch about the size of Coniston and at least
as scenic as Coniston and there's actually no public road which is even
in the same glen - has even a view of it.

The track up to Loch Grannoch was mostly cycling down corridors of
spruce forest. Initially the track was uphill for two or three miles
and sort of average landrover track quality, but halfway down the loch
it was being used by harvesters and forwarders and was a bit chewed up,
and as it started to descend past the lower end of the loch it was very
loose and rough indeed. My Mantra has an enormous amount of good smooth
travel at the back, and four inches of not-very-good suspension at the
front, and it was just about able to cope with going down that track at
a reasonable pace, although it was a jarring experience. I would hate
to try it on a fully laden touring bike, or even a hardtail mountain
bike. And this is THE SAME national cycle route - NCN7 - which meanders
down gentle country lanes not five miles from my home. Sustrans are
crazy. A bike that could cope with the track down from Loch Grannoch to
the Big Water of Fleet Viaduct is not going to be suitable for gentle
country lanes, and vice versa. Still, it was a glorious, fast, bumpy
bash down to the viaduct, and there the first minor problem with my
plan manifested itself.

I hadn't known for certain whether you could get up from NCN 7 onto the
old railway line, but I'd assumed I'd find a way when the time came.
When I got there, there I was on the west bank of the Fleet. And there,
leading up from NCN7, was a nice landrover track up onto the railway at
the west end of the massively sturdy viaduct. And there, neatly across
the viaduct was an eight foot high barbed-wire-entanglement-topped
barrier.

Whoops.

Oh well, not going to get across the viaduct. What now? I did think of
cycling down into Gatehouse and getting a taxi back to the truck, or
even cycling the long way round by the road. But it felt so wimpish.
Instead I turned round and cycled back up towards Loch Grannoch,
crossing the Fleet on a low bridge, to where I'd seen a track off to
the south east. I can't actually focus on a map without my reading
glasses, which I didn't have with me, but it seemed to sweep round and
run parallel to the railway. So I thought I'd try it. Initially there
was a long curving climb on an atrociously loose, rough surface -
although to be fair the Mantra coped with it fairly well and I was able
to keep up a reasonable speed. After a bit it levelled out and ran
straight and I could see by the sun I was riding in approximately the
right direction. I kept thinking that the railway couldn't be more than
a few hundred yards south of me, and kept looking down firebreaks to
see if I could see it. None of them looked ridable. And in any case the
track was now impressively straight and with a nice easy gradient -
impressively well engineered for a forestry road -- and then suddenly I
was in a cutting.

Oh, well, that's alright, then.

After a couple of miles or so of this well engineered (but still quite
rough) track, the track started to twist downhill and I realised I'd
come to the now demolished Little Water of Fleet viaduct. They've made
an impressive job cleaning up. I couldn't see any of the piers - it's
been dismantled completely, almost as if it had never been there. Only
the ends of the old embankment give it away.

In any case the track crossed the Little Water of Fleet and came to a
junction; one branch climbed back up towards the railway line. I
followed this, and to my surprise the second minor problem with my plan
appeared. The track went straight across the old line, and disappeared
off south down the glen. The old line itself was thickly overgrown with
broom and willow. It looked as though I would not be able to get the
bike through.

Whoops.

By the old line I was about five miles back to the truck. By the way I'd
come, about twenty. Down by the road and round, probably the same. I
pushed for fifty yards through thick vegetation, and then suddenly the
track cleared again, and was just the ballast of the railway track
exactly as it must have been when they lifted the sleepers. I got on
and started to ride.

Looking on the map it's about a mile from the Little Water of Fleet
viaduct to Loch Skerrow. However that mile was definitely the most
interesting and most adventurous of the whole trip, and it felt like
more. There were alternately sections of more or less bare clinker,
sections which were partly overgrown with mosses and grass, and
sections which were heavily overgrown (one or two more where I got off
and pushed through). Then (this is Galloway) there were two sharp
granite ridges that ran across the line. What has they done? Blasted
through, of course. Absolutely vertical sided cuttings. There must have
been no more than inches to spare on either side of a standard railway
carriage - it must have been spectacular when the railway was in use.
It's still pretty spectacular.

Then there was a short section where the track ran in a slight cutting,
and it had been flooded for some time. The trackbed was still there,
but under about 200mm of evil greeny-black ooze. I pedalled _very_
carefully through that. Then a quick lift over a gate that clearly
hadn't been opened for a very long time, and there was Loch Skerrow on
my left. The west end of Loch Skerrow - which I'd never seen before -
is even more spectacular than the east end. By this time my headset was
feeling decidedly loose and unhappy. I stopped to try to fix it, but
didn't achieve much. Part of the problem is that so long as you're
cycling the midges can't keep up, but as soon as you stop IT'S
DINNERTIME!

On, despite worries about the headset, through Loch Skerrow halt, and
then bombing down the last couple of miles with Stroan Loch glinting
ahead of me on my left and a rainbow (it was raining again, out of a
clear blue sky) ahead on my right. Brilliant.

Happiness is a filthy bike.

As an afterthought - in the whole trip I saw four cars moving, and two
cars parked. In the carpark at Stroan Loch where I left the truck there
were six people looking at the view; I didn't see any other people at
all. Not bad for one of the most scenic places in Britain, in the
middle of summer.

When we have independence we can...

Well, John Swinney has resigned as leader of the SNP, and I've applied to renew my membership. Perhaps now the SNP can turn itself around. But Swinney was not the problem (or at least I don't think he was the problem); he merely served as a figurehead for the problem. The problem is political caution and negativity.

The SNP, if it is about anything, is about recreating and re-energising Scotland as a nation. We can't do that by endlessly knocking the party in power. We can't do that by endlessly bleating 'the minister must resign'. We need positivity, we need positive policies, and we need a slogan which unites those positive policies into a coherent message.

So what's the coherent message which differentiates a party which at it's core is about Scotland's nationhood from one which is not? Ah, yes.

When we have independence we can...

That slogan has sort of hit me in the face twice in the current week. The first time was about immigration. The BBC news was carrying a story about a young woman who's application to settle in this country was turned down, despite the executive's 'Fresh Talent' initiative. And the underlying reason, of course, is whatever the executive's aspirations, immigration is a reserved matter. Scotland needs immigration, England doesn't.

When we have independence we can set up our own immigration policy.

Of course, as usual in politics, it isn't as simple as that. We're in the EU, and the EU has mobility of labour, so if we give people the right to settle in Scotland we're actually give them the right to settle in the EU, and the bright lights of London (or Frankfurt; or Paris; or Prague) may still beckon. But it is still an area where a distinctively different policy depends on independence.

And then I was looking with disgust at the council's new, blue, recycling bin and the hill of packaging that came from the latest supermarket delivery. You can only put cleanish paper into the recycling bin, but virtually every piece of packaging was anonymous plastic of one sort or another, so it will have to go for landfill. The Germans have their grune punkt scheme for returning packaging to the shop; the Irish have their tax on carrier bags.

When we have independence we can tax packaging.

Of course, we could tax packaging within the UK, and, indeed, other, more overcrowded parts of the UK need to reduce their landfill even more than we do. But no UK party is making much of a push on this, so we can. Yes, I know, it doesn't differentiate us from the Greens. But we need to be making common cause with other parties if, in the new multi-party Scotland, we are to achieve our aims, so I really don't see much downside to that.

"When we have independence we can..." should be a slogan around which the SNP should be able to unite. Regardless of factional stupidities, everyone in the party has a vision of independence. Every positive policy we can put forward is possible given independence, and it's the ones which are more possible given independence which will differentiate us from all Scotland's other vaguely soft left parties.

But the language is important. When, not if. Can, not will. 'When' is confident. It's positive. It says we will get there. 'Can', too, is confident and positive. It says we have the ability, we can make our own choices. Some of those choices (for example, immigration) are hard, and making firm policy commitments about them now will alienate some voters. But so long as we say 'can', we're offering positive, true, hope. When we have independence we can. Whether we will or not is up to the voters then. But we can. And it's that positive true hope which makes us different from other parties, so we should say so.