I went over to Weon & Anne’s this morning, where Ben joined us to watch the first F1 Grand Prix of the season. It took me a while to get over the shock of Jim “Count Von Count” Rosenthal being replaced by Steve “My hair is rock solid and shall never ever move” Ryder.

After yesterday’s bonkers but actually quite excit­ing quali­fy­ing sessions, I had high hopes for Jenson Button and Felipe Massa (who seemingly came out of nowhere to take second on the grid). Alas neither did quite as well as I’d hoped, though they did bring some extra excite­ment to the race, with Massa spinning out and nearly taking eventual winner Fernando Alonso with him, while Button pulled off a few fantastic overtak­ing manou­vers. Nico Rosberg put in a fantastic debut, once he’d recovered from taking out his team-mate on the first corner, while Kimi Raikkonen stormed through from the back of the grid to finish third!

After the race we switched over to watch Manchester United vs Newcastle United and Anne served up a rather fantastic lunch, closely followed by the ever depend­able crumble ‘n custard. Yummytastic.

The after­noon progressed, Man U cruised into a 2-nil lead and I could feel myself sinking deeper and deeper into the armchair. Despite the fact it was blatantly bloody cold outside I got it into my head that going out mountain biking would be a great idea. I got up, announced my inten­tion and then out of nowhere Owen decided he wanted to come too. Rocking! I blasted home, changed into my bike kit, swapped the Cove for the ‘dale and shot back to pick up Owen.

We rode up Leckhampton Hill via a new bridle­way we’d somehow never discovered before (it’s the next turning up from Daisy Bank Road). It’s an evil climb, but gets you to the ruins a fair bit quicker. DPA got us a fair bit further up the hill — and I cleared the ludicrously steep climb at the end! Rock on!

It was absolutely baltic up there, so we elected to keep moving up and over the top. After a quick blast across “Any Given Sunday” (which I’d not ridden for months), I took Owen down the ridicu­lously named “Second Coming” and “La Raclette”. Veryveryveryvery slippery and damn good fun. Finally we descen­ded into the new section where we ran into Alex, Garry and Stubacca who were modify­ing the trail once more.

After chatting about Stu’s board­ing holiday for a while we set off again. I sugges­ted riding back to the top once more, but Owen really wasn’t up for that (and secretly I wasn’t either), so we set off down “The Old Tramway”. I ruled it for the second day in suces­sion, absolutely flying off the little rooty drops in the top section. We only did about ten miles, but it was fantastic fun — and that’s the import­ant thing. No doubt Owen will put some photos up at some point More from Owen.