Here’s a sneak peek at what I’m looking forward to: Jacob’s Ladder, one of my favourite Peak District descents. I don’t know the rider or the guys who filmed him, but watching it made me want to jump in the car and get myself up north post haste!

Let me just pull that up and run it once again: “…a cross-section of cultural influences. Bikes, Music, Architecture, Media, Fashion, Art…”

Now, I love bikes. Right from my first bike, which was a second hand Raleigh girls bike (my Dad insists it was a boys bike, but it so obviously wasn’t that I just go along with it.  He must be deeply ashamed) I have loved bikes. I’ve messed around with BMXs, road bikes, commuters,  and various forms of mountain bikes over the years. And biking effects the way I live my life. But I think it’s being a little bit ostentatious to site ‘Bikes’ as a cultural influence. Come on. Really?

Anyway, that’s really an aside. What I wanted to post about here was a trailer for a video that I found on ‘Prolly Is Not Probably’; a trailer for a film called Empire. It’s about a year old, so don’t expect anything new here. It’s a film about ‘having fun with your bike in the city’, and it looks great: nice production values, lots of footage of hip looking guys and gals doing crazy shit on their fixies, cool locations… awesome, right?

I don’t know.

For a start, as a guy who rides through some of the busiest traffic in London on a daily basis, I was wincing slightly at some of the traffic dodging going on in this clip. I do like to play it fast and loose with traffic to get from A to B as quickly as possible, I will occasionally jump red lights, and I do, almost every day, end up in a silent race with another pumped-up rider, but there’s always a bit of a nod to safety. Especially the safety of pedestrians, who don’t expect or choose to have to deal with some speeding dude on a bike when they’re crossing the road at an authorised point. I’m the last person to get all stuffy about this, most of my friends think I ride ‘like a dick’, but (and I can’t believe I’m about to type this) the guys in the vid come across as a bit…irresponsible. Take risks with your own body by any means, but don’t involve other people.

For another thing, whilst I like fixies and think their smooth lines and uncluttered profile is an attractive thing, I think they look a bit stupid doing urban tricks. It’s a bit like powersliding a caravan – it’s just not right. When you look at Danny MacAskill or the Collective guys their bikes look appropriate for the kind of riding they do. And they are. But a track bike adapted for the road just doesn’t look all that comfortable jumping off stuff. The wheels are just to thin, the tyres too skinny. Get a trial bike or a BMX. I know I’m way out of date on this and that fixie freestyling is the latest thing, but I just don’t buy it.

Anyway, you can judge for yourself!

I think he’s right, to an extent. In one respect the internet is like a giant school-yard. Kids are the spawn of the devil, and have a capacity to hurt each other in a direct way (what did you say, fatty?) that grown-ups in the workplace very rarely do. And when anyone makes a mistake in the schoolyard or the classroom, their fellow students jump on it immediately, mocking and laughing for the rest of that person’s scool career. Reference any hollywood film about high school EVER for examples.

But there’s another aspect of the phenomena that I’m interested in: it’s the FAIL culture that specifically surrounds technology.

I’ve got a feeling that this is where FAIL started: a geek-cool thing, centred around technology, where it became cool to tweet FAIL about your new Android powered phone because you would effectively be saying hey, look at me! I’ve got the latest gadget! But it’s also increasingly a part of society to be impatient with technology, to expect more and more from it and to criticise it when it fails.  This aspect of FAIL culture is much wider than the internet, and is, I suspect, something we’re all guilty of. When was the last time you looked at a piece of technology and truly thought: oh my god, that is absolutely amazing. I have no clue how it works, the guys who made it are geniuses and it very, very rarely lets me down. I don’t. Instead, I shout at my computer if it crashes. So maybe sometimes we should just sit back and realise just how fucking cool everything is, right?

This guy says it much better than me:

According to mountainbikingWales, their trails are all weather. And it can’t have escaped anyone’s notice that last weekend’s weather was fairly extreme. A great chance to test out their claim!

So after arriving on Friday night in a howling gale, spending the night listening to the cabin we were staying in creak and bellow as the wind smashed up against it, and then peering through the rain-lashed window the next day wondering what we were up against, we finally got ourselves kitted out for the adventure: cycling shorts, tights, baggies, base layer, jersey, waterproof: ready to go!

We were woefully under-kitted. I don’t know whether there is ANY kit out there that would have kept us dry, but within half an hour the rain had penetrated every bit of clothing: we were all wet through and freezing cold. The only way to stay warm was to keep on going and hope that the heat generated by exertion would outweigh the cold. It did.

And the trails were perfectly ridable. In fact, with very few other people stupid enough to be out, the trails were very quiet – we had the mountain to ourselves. And the weather changed the complexion of trails we all know very well – broken branches, a thick layer of pine needles, heavy, gusting winds and lots of running and standing water makes for a different – if still very ridable – experience.

So – don’t avoid winter riding just because it’s cold – get out there and experience the ‘all weather’ trail!

The two examples below show the downright intriguing (what exactly is a ‘shrub rocketer’? And who is Spike?) and the schoolboy classic: the penned-on knob. Last seen appended to the head of Jean-Claude from La Rochelle in my GCSE French text book, Ticolor 3, it’s an all-time, world beating visual gag. Enjoy.

Down to business: I’ve been loving this series of tube ads for dixons.co.uk.

The brilliant thing about this series of ads isn’t the subtle use of fonts and colours that enables you to identify Harrods, Selfridges and John Lewis. It’s not even the use of Tube media (and tube lines) to target the message effectively. It’s Dixon’s own recognition that as a stack ‘em high, sell ‘em cheap retailer, they can’t offer the in-store experience that any of the big London department stores can.

They know that people like to physically play with technololgy products before they commit to purchase – whether it’s an iPod, a flat screen telly or a surround sound system. And they know that their stores don’t necessarily give people a great customer experience. Actually, scratch that: they know that when people go to a Dixons store they get pimply straight-out-of-school ‘sales assistants’ who probably know less about the product they’re interested in buying than they do. They also get a plasticy space with stained carpets in a run-down retail unit somewhere. So, far better to play to their biggest strength: price. Go to one of the big  department stores, say Dixons. Have a great time, have a chat with the posh kid who works there, soke up the ambience and feel safely middle class! But then go home and buy your telly off our website, because it’s cheaper.

And after all, there is a recession on. I know what I’ll be doing next time I’m in the market for a flat-screen.

I especially like this picture of a mural by Philip Symonds. A bit Banksy I know, but it’s all in the location. Which is a bike shed in Elephant & Castle, South-East London. Salubrious.

Discovered thanks to Bike Rumor’s Pic Of The Day via @bikerumor on Twitter.

And this:

What a lovely thing. I’m a fan of Talking Heads and by extension David Byrne. And I like the idea of this book. It’s a set of observations, insights and views loosely linked around a cycling theme: David takes his fold-up bike all over the world with him and uses it to get about in various cities – from London to Istanbul to San Francisco to his native New York, amongst others – and he writes down the stuff that happens to him and the things he thinks and feels along the way.

I haven’t started it yet, but intend to dip into chapter one today. I’ll post my thoughts on it later.

More on David Byrne here.

And you can get the book here.

I’ve been cycling for a while, and carry a multi-tool, a spare tube, pump and levers wherever I go – they’re all lightweight pieces of kit and I hardly notice them in my courier bag. And over the years – mainly through emergency trail repairs when mountain biking – I’ve learned to fix most fixable things. Broken chains, bent gear hangers, malfunctioning derailleurs have all been encountered and dealt with. But there are sometimes breakdowns you just can’t fix. More to the point, with lots of new cyclists on the road, most without any basic cycle repair or maintenence training, I think there could be a real demand for this kind of service.

The services in the Netherlands, Fix Fiets and Bike Mobiel, and Fahrradambulanz in Germany seem to charge on a ‘call out’ basis. I wonder whether there might be an opportunity in setting up a bicycle equivalent of the AA or RAC – an insurance-based approach where you pay an annual or monthly sum to have access to the service whether you use it or not. Granted, it might need to be geographically limited – maybe only within certain London ‘zones’, say 1 and 2 to begin with. But I think the idea could work.

I have to thank my friend Aaron (@Granoldo) for flagging this up for me via a link on Twitter.

The clip explains it all much better than I can: