Grid of Posts 3×2

  • Race Around the Netherlands: Dusklands

    Race Around the Netherlands: Dusklands

    My first contact with the Netherlands as a tangible concept was through the writing of J. M. Coetzee. In his book, Dusklands, he writes two narratives, one centred around the Vietnam War, the other around a hunting expedition in South Africa. In the latter, the bounded and manufactured environment of the Netherlands, where the narrator… Read more

  • Race Around the Netherlands

    The tracker is up (rider 14), and on May 1st I’ll be starting the Race Around the Netherlands. My goals are: get to the start get to the finish following the route catch my return flight so I can wish my youngest Happy Birthday! I would post a kit-grid but I am so disorganised that… Read more

  • A tale of three documentaries

    This post is a review (of sorts) touching on three films about cycling. All portray amateur efforts to overcome physiological and psychological limitations, and two of the three end up, by chance, being about topics rather grander (and darker) than the original intentions of the film-makers. The final film of the set is no less… Read more

  • Festive 500: Let’s Simplify

    There is a card in the game Fluxx which allows you to remove new rules. My attempt on the Festive 500 started with a fairly simple schedule, but with the premise that I would just ride some of my normal local roads, adjusted for the weather.  In the end, after a hilly first fit on Christmas Eve,… Read more

  • Cycling is a foreign country: exoticism, skulduggery and the British.

    Why is it that British success at the Tour de France (or anywhere on the Continent) seems so dissonant? Why is it such a shock to many of my fellow British that it might be built on deceit and immorality? Is it that “foreign” cyclists and cycling tap into a rich British desire to both… Read more

  • Get Carter: 400 – 260 = audax hotel again

    You’re a big man, but you’re in bad shape. With me it’s a full time job. There’s a missing post before this one which was too dark to share. So tangentially, I pass over a completed 300 and get to a failed 400 with a long name: a night in a beautiful bus shelter and… Read more