I live in France. Have you tried involving the start village? Our village fete committee organises a couple of events – a mountain bike randonee (200+ people this year and 4 routes)  and a fun run (again 200+ people) – and has whatever public liability insurance is required in France. Riders and runners are much loved – to the point of cheese and wine at the feed stations – because, well, France. Villages are all different but running events seems to be generally supported & ‘don’t be a dick’ seems to get you a long way.

Good luck! Breaking my ankle meant I was off my bike from 13 Oct to 24 Dec which seemed long enough. First ride was quite emotional.

Interesting though the debate about whether CyB trails are any good is, there’s a basic mismanagement issue

The bike shop is independent, run well and does ok on the current visitor numbers.

The parking and cafe is run by NRW who don’t seem to be good at getting money in eg:

Car park machines regularly out of action – leaving a major part of the site’s income on the floor (& no there isn’t a penalty for the provider)

Cafe run badly (see comments above about opening hours, food selection etc) also leaving income for the taking.

Get those sorted by people who know and are invested in the area and the financial picture would look different and enable better trail upkeep and development.

I once had two come round whilst I was trying to shear an Angora goat in my yard. You can walk into said yard off the lane so they had kind of let themselves in on the way towards the kitchen door.

I had the goat in position and this was quite an achievement as it was a wriggly little item so I wasn’t going to stop just to debate religion. I told them (or technically I told the goat’s stomach which filled most of my field of vision) that I was quite happy with my beliefs and continued shearing. Hand shears are quite large and pointy and when I glanced up they were backing away very satisfactorily.

These days I’ve met a few more ex-JHs who have described just how horrible a cult it is from the inside and who have been really damaged by it. If I get chance I  am much more forthright about my view that it’s actually an enormously nasty organisation that has harmed many of its members. The lion lying with the lamb on judgement day is obvious bollocks but the pain it’s causing real people through shame, control and manipulation in the here and now is horrible.

Reality isn’t infinitely divisible?

The cafe has been in decline for a bit culminating in food in packets only ant the moment – according to a friend who has been there. The visitor numbers aren’t the issue – the whole thing smacks of mismanagement with the possibility that it’s deliberate to make it easy to flog. Given the Bike Park Wales lease maybe they are thinking something like that but without understanding it’s a completely different kind of trail centre.

Parking revenue down? Well yes, if your machines are constantly out of order.

Not sorting out your contract to ensure guaranteed up time of the means to collect a substantial revenue stream is basically leaving the money for fixing trails etc on the floor. Not sure if it’s incompetence, that they’ve just lost interest or are actively sabotaging the site.

If it’s healing powers we’re after, I’d like whatever got Vingegaard from broken ribs and punctured lung to winning a sprint against Pog.

V relieved! My (proxy) vote went to Josh and I am sure he’ll work hard for Calderdale. I couldn’t stay up all night so I’ve been reading this as catch up live feed from France. Thanks all… hope you’ve survived the merlot and cheese intake.

When the FT ismore pro labour than the Guardian I think that any worries about labour being ‘anti business’ are a bit unfounded. Businesses function better in functioning countries.

I live in the Pyrenees and work as a consultant remotely. I do worry as it’s a trek to get anywhere but I like the sleeper train and show up in the UK for speaking engagements and conferences every couple of months. It’s been good so far – the contrast when I spend a week in a city with home is quite pleasing and I’m happy to get back to the mountains

We were followed riding home once. Lent bikes up to open door and do some faffing just inside. Realised that the car was turning round in our neighbours drive as one of its occupants was striding towards said bikes. Luckily we were between him and bike sharpish and he just turned round and got back in the car. We called the police. Car was nicked (they implied) and came back another day. We had told our neighbour who spotted it and followed it – it was just casing roads in the towns around looking for opportunities. If your spider senses go, they are probably right v

I’ve got £176 of  import duty that was incorrectly applied to my import back. Is that a benefit? I only had to spend an hour researching what to do, filling in the form online then printing it out and posting it to HMRC… hopefully the other £500 of incorrectly charged VAT will reappear when I do my VAT return.

I have had them off and on. Went to a physio once when I was so sick I put my back out. She fixed my back then also did things to my neck that reduced them in frequency and severity for a few years.

Two years ago I moved away then started getting 1-3 dayers every month (and yes, I’m female and they were completely in line with my  hormone cycle). Then I had to start losing some weight because I broke my ankle and sat around putting weight on for three months. To my complete surprise and delight I’ve not had one since I started counting calories. I’m not sure whether it’s calorie restriction or eating less of something accidentally as part of the diet (I have just eaten less not cut anything out completely).  It’s weird but so welcome.  If anyone has any explanations pile in… anyone else I would say try it if you’re slightly over a ‘good for you’  weight.

Someone should tell Private Eye that they have an infestation of mountain bikers in their subs list.

Thanks! I am in two minds. I don’t want AI trained on my images (I think they feature my friends and relatives and I’m not second guessing whether they want to be ai fodder) but I am less sure about words. I like to think that ai like me would be more reasonable and informed and less prone to hallucinations…

Just for context I occasionally press LinkedIn’s ‘rewrite with AI’ button and get my words turned into anodyne marketing speak. I haven’t used it. I would rather be slightly rubbish and real.

Big hug. That’s a massive contribution and way more I could do or have done. Respect. And a hug. You deserve some peace and sunshine.

Another for the Private Eye club. I get it for the ‘you heard it here first’ and campaigning journalism – the Post Offive scandal was outlined years before Mr Vates vs the Post Office. Interesting that so many others get it!

I live in France so tend not to buy magazines in shops because my French is slow and I’m impatient. In German bookshops there are walls of them and I’m sometimes tempted by eco house build mags or a mtb mag to compare with STW (they turn out to be mainly numbers).  Otherwise I buy books and get news digitally. I’ve switched to Foreign Affairs and Wired on digital. But have to remember to read them.

I had similar symptoms and I thought it was just age and stuff that had been going on as I was grieving the loss of my dad. GP was really keen to do blood test and it turns out I was really anaemic. It felt like I’d had a magic potion when the iron kicked it!

Feeling smug that I sorted my proxy vote out earlier this year because I am out of the country long term. My proxy vote is in a marginal so I am hoping my legacy is to get rid of the unbelievably horrid Tory there.

OMG, I have just tried to reclaim £700 of VAT and customs duty incorrectly charged on an import. You fill in a form on the HMRC website and… POST it to HMRC. What the actual?? Who in their right mind designs these things? Non-tariff trade barrier loving morons. ‘**** business’ Boris said. Obviously as an imperative.

France. Every village. And they all have budgets. Local democracy is ‘lively’.

Nope. Just in the process of setting up a business in France so that I can export stuff to my UK company 🙄. Anyone who thinks ‘it’s just admin’ can do one – admin increases costs (and reduces bike riding time which I need to get my head round the worry of admin)…

+1 for Scotland where you can get married outdoors. In Peebles. And go mountain biking. Although for us the mountain biking wasn’t until the day after – once we’d consumed our body weight in food and chatted to all our friends and family that could make it.

If I still lived in the UK I would be demanding that we become an overseas colony of France. I’m sure no one would mind if M. Macron could arrange for all the roads in Britain to be fixed up like the ones round here. So smooth.

I was made redundant in 2017 and was going to find a job. It never happened because I was too busy working on projects as a freelance.  I have had to get used to the worries of freelance but it has allowed me a lot of freedom to live out of London. A couple of bits of advice:

Pay yourself the same amount every month and build up a bit of a reserve – that cushions the cash flow and chasing money.

Treat the admin as an actual bit of the job and remember that your rate has to cover you for that admin time as well. It means you have to set aside time for admin too.

The other thing is money and marriage. We have a ‘team money’ approach since we got married. Our contributions to the joint budget fluctuate a bit but we talk about how we make enough between us to afford the things we do. It makes it clear and feels pretty supportive.

Argh, that sounds awful.  I hope it you get it sorted and in the mean time the antibiotics calm it down.

Also, I didn’t know that could happen either. I have to decide whether to have mine taken out and that is an interesting contribution to the weighing up process.

We had socialist champagne at our wedding. My brother’s French mother in law bulk purchased it through her union (champagne being a basic human right in France).

We liked it so much that we moved to France. It’s going to be interesting coming back to the UK. We’re probably on the list already…

Fearless by Pink Floyd.

Bit of a throwback but it’s perfect for so many crappy occasions

‘You say the hill’s to steep to climb. You say you’d like to see me try. You pick the place and I’ll choose the time. And I’ll climb the hill in my own way. Just wait a while for the right day. and as I rise about the tree line and the clouds I look down, hear the sound of the things you said today….

And if all else fails there’s Beethoven’s ninth.

A thread to make you smile! I rode to the shops and up the hill…

I think Greenacres might be partly responsible for us living in France – the ads followed the other half round the internet through the coldest winter of Covid: https://www.green-acres.fr/en

We actually bought direct from the vendors and it went ok. We live in the Pyrenees Orientales now, trails from the door and a train to the city for €1. I was keen to move to Germany (half-German) but I’ve completely fallen for France. It’s way better organised than the UK, beautiful and the food is amazing. Being in a border area there are loads of people speaking multiple languages (first time in my life I’ve not felt odd about being multi-lingual) and it’s been super welcoming and our French has been encouraged even though it was pretty rubbish when we arrived.

Road economics is one of those things that completely flummoxes me. To build roads (in the Westminster model) you get an economist to tell you what economic benefit you get for your expenditure. For some reason if you can put cars through a junction faster people save time and your economic benefit increases so you can ‘invest in roads’.

I’ve yet to see anyone actually evaluate the benefit after said road is open (it usually clogs up with additional traffic and slows down pretty quickly) so we have a bizarre model that has fed constant road building but seemingly without much regard for anything once the ribbon has been cut (like induced demand and road maintenance). The disbenefits of cars moving quickly seems to not be calculated either – you’re looking at an easy million in police time and NHS costs for a road traffic accident (which correlate to speed). So basically we build roads so that we can move quickly for a short time and cost ourselves a fortune when someone inevitably messes up. No wonder the Welsh government has decided to limit road building and go for slower speeds.

After the wall went down, my dad moved back to the east of Germany. I would far rather live in Erfurt or Leipzig than a UK city. They have functioning public transport, historic centres, thriving cultural scenes. The west German money was well-spent.

The AFD is a massive problem in semi-rural areas. There are weird legacies from the old east in the way history was processed. West Germany went through a huge communal guilt and grieving process that affected everything including how history was taught in schools. I’m sure it was imperfect but it was different in timbre to the way that the East Germans dealt with its Nazi history. There was more ‘that’s not us now, we’re socialists’, it was as though by moving into the Soviet block the history was eradicated or absolved according to my dad and family. Also there was a fair amount of pointing at the ‘corrupt west’ whenever anyone who could be seen as part of the Nazi administration was allowed back into any part in civil life. And whilst they may have had a point there was very little soul-searching done or general comprehension of the enormity and profundity of the holocaust and the roles that East Germans must have played.

Couple this with the willingness that many people had to go along with the East German state. Which was utterly nuts (my dad’s Stasi file is massive). There were lots of people who got used to living in the mirror world in which everyone spied on everyone else. There were others that liked it and joined the Party. My mum has a friend who is left-wing, nostalgic, and is totally amazed and can’t really get her head round how much time my dad spent in jail for crimes like ‘writing to the BBC’.

So 40 years of communism, reunion and the inevitable economic disparities between east and west (which are greater out of the cooler cities) has fed into disaffection, the tenor of which is nasty and scary.

I’m not sure how to fix it. Sometimes people just don’t know what they’ve got.

Anecdotal from France… resurfacing roads seems to be a pretty quick job. There’s a big thing that scrapes off the old surface and another puts the new surface down. There may be some tamping (I am not an engineer, in case you’re in any doubt) but it’s all over very quickly. I’ve seen similar machines on motorways in the UK but there seem to be dinky versions here. The general understanding is that people are paid well here and taxes augment their cost to employers so there’s every incentive to get things done in the most efficient way possible to keep staff costs down.

@tjagain – yes the borders thing is very forgotten yet also still present in many people’s lives. The flows of people during and post ww2 were incredible but submerged in the general awfulness of the time.

I have a friend who has no family memorabilia at all. One parent was a German from Pomerania – fled there as it reverted to Poland. The other Sudetenland German had to leave what is now the Czech Republic.

My dad first saw me at Checkpoint Charlie.

The Berlin Wall has been part of my life for basically all of it. But it doesn’t surprise me that people aren’t clear about the geography. It was pretty weird. And it only kind of crept up slowly – the borders were porous to start with. I remember talking to an old German lady on a train just after the wall went down. She told me how she basically would go off for little holidays out of East Germany in the early days after the war. Wriggle under some wire, or slip the border guard a bottle of booze. Then it got harder and harder as the Russians tightened their grip / the economic situation slipped behind the west. Readings of history put different emphases on these factors but basically by the time my dad realised that he needed to get out the Iron Curtain was pretty solid. It was brutal.

I spent many summer holidays crossing into the East. It was like stepping back in time. Everything was smaller, more cobbled together and more likely to fall apart. The landscape and the cities were polluted. Acid rain was affecting forests. Urban landscapes were wreathed in the sputtering outputs of two stroke engines. At one and the same time I felt the ache of the divided country, the families split apart like my own, but completely believed reunification was impossible.

I hope it gets better. I had an unexpected tooth extraction yesterday and am still feeling a bit sorry for myself. The dentist was super slick and the process wasn’t that bad itself but she told me that that particular tooth is too close to my sinus to put a simple implant in (I’d have to have a graft first) so I was thinking ‘what if my jaw breaks and my head falls apart’ whilst she was doing it. I’d barely had the thought before she finished though.
I had a broken tooth under a crown in ‘things that can go wrong with your teeth version 9 million and 92’’. Only mild pain but developing a nice infection nevertheless. Ewwww.
GWS

I think the first vehicle I saw when I got off the train this morning was a cargobike. I can totally buy into the way it’s going.

If VED was proportionate to road damage, it would indeed increase exponentially with weight. I think the calculation for road wear is in proportion to the fourth power of axle weight.

A light vehicle (500kg – 1 axle 250kg) with 2 axles would cause 256 times less road wear than a 2000kg vehicle (1 axle 1000kg).

I think road damage is calculated as proportionate to the fourth power of axle weight. Which basically means that as vehicles get bigger and heavier the damage they cause is exponentially greater. This applies not just to farm vehicles but to SUVs (of which there are many). It’s no wonder the roads are terrible.

I have wondered whether it’s possible to quantify the relative impacts of more and heavier cars and more and heavier plant vehicles but I’ve not got round to it. That would be a long wet afternoon project.