I found a couple of old hard drives lying around at home the other day, so I plugged them in to see if there was anything interesting on there.

I’m quite glad I did really, because I found a shed-load of pictures from my various digital cameras stretching right back to a trip to Afan Argoed in the year 2000. So now I’m slowly but surely backfilling my Flickr stream with some of the better ones. So when you see pictures of out-dated bikes and kit popping up, that’s why – although I still seem to have a lot of that kit now…

If nothing else it’s a great showcase of just how far budget digital cameras have come on over the years. Compare this photo from 2000 to this one from the other day: It’s quite a leap forward.

Update: Flickr caught-up!

A couple of weeks later and I think I’ve finally finished wading through them all now. Follow the links for pictures from 2000, 2001, 2002, 2003 and 2004. Normal (shonky) service might resume at some point…

Yes Weon, I saw you smugly waving from the warmth of your car. I bet you didn’t have as much fun as I did though, did you?

You see, for the second day in succession, I waited until the rain stopped before setting off on the ‘dale. For the second day in succession it starting tipping down within five minutes of me leaving the house, but I was going by then and there was no way I was turning back.

By the time I got to Daisy Bank car park I was absolutely drenched. I arrived just in time to find Nick unloading his 222 from the hire-car (Oh, sorry, we’ve got no Corsas left -how about we rent you this nice Mondeo for the same money?). We whinged about the weather for a bit before setting off up the hill for a blast down the DH tracks.

The first run down was just plain horrible. It was pouring with rain, the trails were slippy as hell and not a great deal of fun. We contemplated not going up for another one, but seeing as we were already covered in mud…

The second run was absolutely mint. It was pouring with rain, the trails were slippy as hell and we were getting used to the conditions by now. Drift-o-rama. I was riding like a wet flannel (no change there then), so Nick left me for dead on every run – but that didn’t stop me having bucketloads of fun.

We got back to the car park to find Neil Cousins (of TFTuned fame) unloading his spanking new Santa Cruz V10, so we showed him all of the new trails. We went slip-sliding down each of the trails in turn. First up was “Love Child” – wherein I left the bike attached to a tree and slid down the trail on my arse. Secondly we took on “Second Coming” which I got down in one piece, somehow. Finally we rode “La Raclette”. I dropped my chain, which was the perfect excuse for wussing out of doing the stupid log-drop halfway around a 180° corner.

By that point we were all starving and the wind had started howling, so we called it a day. Neil kindly gave me a lift back across town in exchange for the use of our hose-pipe and a cup of tea. Bizarrely, I think we did more riding today in the pouring rain than we would’ve done on a typical summer sunday afternoon.

Oh, one thing. Next time I take the ‘dale out downhilling in conditions like that, can someone remind me to fit some flat pedals (or maybe take the 222 out instead)? The SPDs clogged up almost instantly, which is always rubbbish.

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.

Saturday was supposed to be a tourist trip to London, but alas that fell through at the last minute. Luckily Simon swooped in with a trip over to the forest of dean for a bit of cross-country bike malarkey. I grabbed a lift from the G-Dog and despite getting caught up in some closed road shenanigans en-route, we eventually arrived and met up with Si and Emma at the cycle centre.

After the usual extended faffing we headed off around the FODCA trail, me on the ‘dale, Garry on the shiny Enduro, Simon on his Yeti DH6 and Emma on a tiny Spesh Hardrock.

The trail is only about 4km or so long, but that’s 4km of technical, swoopy, rooty joy. None of us were on top form, struggling up the climbs and depositing ourselves ungracefully in the dirt on the descents. Garry even managed to pull an SPD-cleat right out of his shoe at one point.

It was all good fun though, especially the final section of the trail which is a slice of fast swoopy singletrack from bike-heaven. WOOP!

After a quick bite to eat we set off again, for a nice relaxing half-hour jaunt down the fireroads to the lake. It quickly became a jaunt that took us miles off-course and significantly more than half an hour.

Fireroads aren’t the most interesting things in the world, but the slog was well worth it. We eventually found ourselves at the top of some lovely singletrack which took us across the top of the hill before diving steeply down the side, taking us nearly all the way back to the cycle centre. Lovely stuff.

I hadn’t ridden the 222 for ages. It’d been in the cupboard since Rheola and was in need of a blast. So on Friday night I dragged it out kicking and screaming, made the siezed bottom bracket and freehub spin again and then changed the oil in the forks. That last job is one I’ve been putting off for months, or is it more than a year now? Either way, they had too much oil in them, which meant I was only ever getting about two thirds of the available travel. So I changed the oil, put less in than Marzocchi reccommend, and huzzah! All the travel is available. Winner!

So on Saturday, Anton, Garry and myself dragged our Oranges (two 222’s and a 224) up Leckhampton hill, covered ourselves in body armour and ragged them down the trails all afternoon. I discovered that I had completely forgotten how to ride a bike and had to re-learn the skill over a few hours. Still, I conquered a few more bits of trail, fell down a few others and generally had an ace time. It wasn’t even all that cold. Anton had just fitted his new 888 RC2X forks (you can buy me some if you like) and was getting used to riding a bike without a 25 tonne boat anchor attached to the front.

Avid readers of Weon’s pages (is my jacket really that pink?) will already know that Sunday took me out on my other silver single-pivot full susser. It’s bonkers how bikes have progressed in the last few years. My XC bike isn’t far off having as much suspension travel as the DH bike. Luckily it weighs quite a lot less, or the climb up Cleeve Hill would have been even more painful than it was. We managed to offset the pain with attacks of the giggles – inventing things like Arse Knuckles and the Wheelie-activated Hunting Horn tends to do that to you. Luckily the descents were a lot more fun than the climb, even if the mud made them as slippery as a slippy thing. The trail down to the washpool was ever so slighly sketchy, but the rocky run down to the Rising Sun and then the Devils Steps more than made up for it, even if Owen did nearly run me over on the final stretch down to the road. You haven’t got disc-brakes mate – you need to slow down before I do!

Speaking of which, I nearly went deaf on the ride back into town – my front brake developed a horrendous banshee-like wail that didn’t relent until I put the bike away at home. Must remember to sort that.

I finished the evening off by returning to Weon and Anne’s for dinner. We watched the very good House of Flying Daggers, whilst gorging ourselves (an understatement) on Anne’s fantastic cooking: A chicken-based cottage pie (alas not made of real cottages), then crumble and custard for pudding. Very good pie. Mmmm pie. Thanks Anne :)

I’ve been wanting to redesign this place for ages, but I’ve never really found the time or indeed motivation to do it properly. I needed to change the look with absolute minimum effort for me: I figured a new header image was probably the easiest way to do it, so that’s exactly what I’ve done (it should look like this – you may need to hit reload or clear your cache if you’re not seeing it).

G-Dog gets his five minutes of fame this time. You can tell the pictures are quite old – he’s riding an Orange 222 (You’re my bike now Dave!). They were taken back in July of last year up on Leckhampton Hill , then amalgamated in Photoshop. Yes, I know it all needs a bit of tweaking – especially the navigation. I’ll get around to it at some point.

Oh and a completely unrelated HAPPY BIRTHDAY BAGGUS!

All two of you. Many happy returns to Mr Pollard and Lord Everitt. Hope you’re having a good one.

That is all, please return to whatever you were doing before I rudely interrupted you.

This evening I finally saw the first episode of My Name is Earl.

Both Sara and Weon have been raving on about it since it first aired over in the states months ago, but I never found the time to sit down and watch it. They were right: It’s absolutely brilliant. I just hope the rest of the series lives up to this one…