#I try to minimise myself into the sky above my house but

[blackvahana]

Oh man. Can I tell you how nice it is to be back in tune with Nature... Ive slowly been figuring out part of why I keep digging into spirits mentally that act like humans, I keep trying to find some kind of familiar Spirit Consciousness or someone that functions like me and I am. alien. and. I mean. Fuck! Here's part of why! Nature spirits! God ! Look! Do you see how they think? How they breathe? It's so... They're weaving with their existence, their minds are not animal not plant but somewhere on a third point on the graph, they. understand me. and yeah they get more being-y when they talk to you with animal (kingdom including human) faces and stuff but

Anyway. I can like. feel my body again. I am a huge mass of different things, different form, one aspect is like a blanket settled over the world that weaves into trees. There's this area I see in mind where these beings knit me, that's the translated vision at least, they're knitting me closed and soothing my body. They're trees, and... astral things that aren't plant or animal but both, they're plants, this whole congregation is eyes like vesica pisces drawn from all the things in the area. It's really nice, here I am fog but not literal fog just... Dense and woven into the forest

There's a desert somewhere else getting to know me, looking up at me like it's a little baby lizard with big ole eyes - it is NOT a baby, I don't belittle it, it's that sense of newness and wide eyed wonder that our race were all incarnated into here only really sees in baby animals. It's restructuring it's interior coding (memories, making them) based on reading mine... And the second part other than wide-eyedness of saying it feels new is. I have. been here long before it, but I don't think it fully recognises me, more so it would recognise me as myself but it is registering my new info because I am a New Person compared to who im an incarnation of and... It tells me I haven't woven completely into the sky yet, I am old-new, I'm un woven, un-taken-in to the circle around the fire where the ceremonies are held. Got it. I will keep that in mind thank you

And another place... Do you know what oxygen in the ocean is? Here I'm spray, I'm suspended bubbles, I'm thrown about by the ocean and it's a. fucking. bliss state I have. missed. so dearly

[creative-splurges]

Lightning

One night, somehow already over two years ago, I found myself at midnight unable to sleep. There was a torrential storm going on, so I got up and poked my head out of the window to see the most intense lightning storm I have seen before or since.

I’ve always been impressed by lightning photography, but have rarely found myself in a sustained enough storm to warrant the trial and error form of shooting I tend to employ for any sort of photography that has a particular technique to it.

So the fact that it was the middle of the night and my wife was fast asleep be damned, I decided I was awake enough to give it a go, and would be silly to miss this opportunity. So I grabbed my camera, googled the best way to photograph lightning, and started trying to get some shots.

For the record, I’d also like it known that I tried to wake my wife, because she loves storms, but all she did was grunt and roll over, so she missed it all and was annoyed at me the next morning (and indeed has remained so ever since) for not successfully waking her.

The advice for shooting lightning that I found was relatively simple: use bulb mode (which keeps your shutter open as long as you keep your finger on the release), use an ISO of 100-200, and an aperture of f/5.6, and then keep the shutter open for spells and hope you get lucky.

I spent half an hour trying to take photos whilst the lightning continued. Luckily it would persist in certain spots so I could train my camera at that direction and try my best, and then shift my direction as the storm itself moved. I did not, however, leave the house. I’ve not got anything to protect my camera gear whilst in use, and since I had been trying to sleep I was not exactly dressed for the outside world, so I took these shots from my living room. Not wanting to make the noise of setting up my tripod, as well as the knowledge using my tripod would make it hard to get close to the window, I elected to shoot with my camera resting on my windowsill, right up against the glass for both stability and to minimise any reflections (although all the indoor lights were turned off anyway so there were few reflections to speak of).

Most of my first attempts were, if you’ll forgive the expression, a little damp.

8sec, f/4, ISO 100, 24mm

As you can see, shooting through a rainy window has added nothing to the sharpness of the image. I also didn’t have much luck with where I was pointing the camera, because the small amount of lightning you can see is in the very top corner of the frame. Finally, clearly the exposure was out, because between the long shutter and the amount of lightning the image doesn’t look particularly like it was taken at night.

Sometimes I had a little more luck with the framing, but the exposure was still off.

6sec, f/4, ISO 200, 24mm

As you can see, I was still dialling in the settings too. The exposure is still too long: the sky is too bright, and the fork of lightning I’ve managed to capture is a bit faint. I wasn’t being helped by the rain-splattered window I was shooting through either.

The storm started to come past us, and I continued to dial in my settings. Eventually my angle to the lightning found me looking towards one of the blocks opposite us, where someone was evidently still up. This next shot doesn’t feature any lightning, but it does help set he scene a little, my own grubby window and nearby streetlight included.

5sec, f/8, ISO 100, 24mm

Eventually – eventually – I got lucky, and the 5-second window my shutter was open for coincided with a bolt of lightning. I put it through the same post-processing at the image above, and then through another filter to encourage the contrast a little more. This is the end result.

5sec, f/8, ISO 100, 24mm

Eventually the storm passed by, and I continued trying to get some shots of the lightning out of the back of the flat. Sadly the storm was beginning to wane at that point, and with slightly closer buildings I wasn’t able to get much – this is about the only shot that contains any lightning, which was you can (probably just about) see is comparatively very faint.

All told I took about 200 shots… just to get essentially one photograph worth sharing. But as far as I’m concerned it was totally worth it. Sure, it’s not the cleanest lightning photograph ever taken; certainly the grubby window reflecting the streetlight looks really untidy, but I also think it adds to the feel of being inside watching a thunderstorm.

Now of course, there is an amount of processing going on in this shot, which is both bringing out the lightning and also emphasising the purplish hue of the sky. Just to give you an idea of how relatively little processing has happened, I wanted to also share the original shot. You can compare the two below.

The other image I wanted to share was the mid-process shot, after the work in Lightroom but before the additional definition was applied, because I’m still partial to it as a shot and I’m sure some people will prefer it.

This remains the single most intense lightning storm I’ve ever experienced. In fact, it was so intense it made the news, with one newspaper claiming it as ‘the mother of all storms‘. It was an epic storm and I’m glad I was awake for it.

Just don’t mention it to my wife. She’s still a bit bitter about missing it.

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[weirdthingtosay]

I am imagining my father.

As I sit here, he is alone, in his cold but beautiful small farmhouse an hour from the nearest city. His house is filled with heavy, dark-wood furniture. The floor completely concealed by Persian rugs, overlapping each other and bumped and bruised from being trodden on and chewed by dogs. Intricately oppressive golden incense burners, the kind you find in a church, swing from the lowest of the beams, vomiting scent clouds into the room at head height which never quite dissipate into the gabled ceiling. They remind me of how I would play when I was three or four, jumping up into the smog-cloud of his cigarettes, visible, always, just above me in the living room - I used to imagine it was what being in the sky was like.

His walls are lined with books, mostly history, some philosophy of science, and almost all bound in linen with gold embossed titles. He had an obsession with the Folio Society for a while, he spent all of my mum’s money (the only income, until she fell ill) on those books. We shared cheap packets of pre-stuffed tortellini between four of us for months. The same happened when he was obsessed with weight lifting, model trains, motorbike engines, guitars, mosaic making, handmade shoes, Rolex watches, pipes, bonsai trees, wooden canes, belt buckles, and Toyota XR2is. Currently his obsession is making walking sticks and leather items. Buttons, bags, collars, whips.

He has always liked canes and whips. Once he brought home a blackthorn cane, and told my sister and I it’s illustrious history, and how we should respect and fear it, and that he was looking forward to using it. We knew what that meant. He wanted to put it on the coffee table to be seen at all times, but our dog wouldn’t stop trying to run off with it so he angrily hid it behind the sofa and went upstairs to sulk and sleep. We took it out and fed it, piece by piece, to the dog. I told this story, laughing at how clever we had been and how funny it was when he couldn’t find anything as good to beat us with despite being so angry, at school the next day. The silence of my friends was embarrassing, the silence of my teachers even more so.

I went to visit him two weeks ago, for the first time in a long time. It was still too soon. He showed me his ‘workshop’, a small space between living room and kitchen which has been filled with mandrels, hammers, materials, and tools I couldn’t afford. He’s making a walking cane with a tiger’s head on it, he says a rich ‘Indian’ wants it. I’m sure this is something he has imagined. He asks me what I think of his work, this being my ‘area of expertise’ (it is not), I play along. Yes, it’s nice (it is not). Yes, I think he might be able to sell some (I do not). He asks if I want to see the whips. Sure, I say.

Leading me back into the living room, I am instructed to sit down on a deep, musty armchair. In front of it I see a tapestried footrest which he hounded me for two years to restore for him as I ‘know about these things’. I eventually rinsed it under a tap and coloured it in with Sharpies and gave it back to him, to much praise. He takes out two long, poorly made whips, one tan, one black, and hands me the tan one. As I lift it up to look, the three dogs he owns who had been resting on the floor in front of us jump up at once. They back away, quickly, hiding their tails and cowering. I drop the whip down and say “I’m sorry, I’m sorry!”, my heart is in my intestines and I’m at once aware that I mustn’t apologise and I mustn’t show I understand because he will punish me for it. I became everything in the room, for a split second, I became me - the adult runaway returning to him, me - the child hiding from injury, the dog - cowering and looking up at someone they trust, expecting to be hit and trying to minimise it, and him - the old man, who knows what he has done, who knows all of this, and sees.

I pick the whip back up, he shouts at the dogs to stop their nonsense, I tell him its very good and feign inspection and approval. I go off to cook us all dinner, the oven breaks, he wails at it like it can hear him and rants and raves into the door. Eventually we eat from a  camping stove. I’m not sure how he is surviving out there. There was nothing but spices in the cupboard. Nothing in the fridge except hallucinogenic mushrooms. Eventually, I’m going, I make the mistake of looking him dead in the eyes before I do so. He cries instantly, tell me he wishes he was a monk, he wants to be locked in a cell. I make a joke about it, tell him to commit a crime then, the rent’s cheaper. I leave as quickly as I can.

A week later he calls me. He has had the most traumatic day of his life, he says. He’s crying. I’m at work but I step out into the car park to listen to him. I don’t want to. He tells me a long story about how he walked with his dogs to the bottom of his garden in the morning, just as the sun bled into the clouds (his words), and that they had begun to fight one another. He tried to break them up. They wouldn’t. He hit them all with a spade. He dragged one of them, the smallest, back into the house and passed out, eventually waking from cold. He said he went back outside, to find the last two dogs and bring them in. They are still fighting. He reckons its been about four hours. He says they all ended up in the pond. He says there’s a man inside him. He says he hit them all with a spade again. He says he had to ‘make a choice, kid, I had to choose’ the dogs were ‘going to kill each other’ and that he’s living in some kind of parallel universe ‘the younger dog or the older dog’ and he can’t get out ‘he was going to kill him I had to make a choice I chose the younger dog’ so he grabbed the spade and smashed it’s head in.

I nod, and ‘mhmm’ at the right places. I’m numb and blank in a car park, white walls from the surrounding kitchens making the sky black. It is so clear it’s like water, a black mirror, and I can see where my face should be reflected there is a solitary dog, an animal I felt I was, an animal I have been, on it’s back outside in the cold under that same infinite yet smothering darkness. I’m dead, it’s dead, we’re all fucking dead. There’s no life-as-it-was after this. There’s no forgetting how he kicked our childhood dog to death, how he dragged my mum out into the street when she had her stroke, no laughing at disposing of that cane. It’s here, it’s back. It is not the past. I am not a runaway, I’m just running in circles and now we’re all fucking dead.

I spend the next week deep in phone calls and decisions about sectioning and police and ‘has he shot himself?’s with my sister. We don’t know what to do. Why should we? Why should anyone know how to deal with this? We can’t get him sectioned, he’ll attack anyone who goes there and end up arrested. We can’t call the RSPCA, the dogs bit him when he attacked them and they’ll be put down. Something has to live through this. We ring him constantly, eventually he picks up. He’s not shot himself - good, I say (I’m not sure if it is), I can rehome the other dogs, I just have to go and get them. He seems calmer now. Maybe we should check on him, we say. And then the universe replies - and snows us in for two days. We were supposed to be driving to get the dog and to take it to it’s new owners, for a test run. They can’t make it and neither can I. In the days between these events my heart has softened. I’ve thought of taking him in, of helping him, of closing us off and of my duty and putting all of my self preservation aside - sacrificing myself to this great man, just as he’s always taught me. I phone him to tell him I’m sorry but I can’t make it today, I’m snowed in, we’ll have to reschedule. No, he says. He needs me to come down. He can’t face going outside. He wanted to bury the dog in a circle of saplings, to give it eternal life. He’s a psychopathic murderer, he says. He can’t look at the dog he killed a week ago. Can’t look at it’s ‘slit throat’. I thought it was a spade, I say. He says he killed his best friend. He slit his best friend’s throat. I have to go and move the dog. He’s phoned the college I work at and is enrolling. We’ll live within 15 miles of each other. I’m a good kid. I need to move the dog. No one else will understand. I’m the only one. I’m a good kid, not like the others. He’s got the blues. Life is hard to him.

I told him I’ll come as soon as a I can, but it won’t be this week. Maybe after Christmas. I can see the chain of events now. I opened the door again, I let him back in. He managed to get his nails in a crack and is ripping an opening. ‘You’re stupid for animals’, he used to say to me ‘they don’t have feelings, you let them manipulate you’. I said, maybe, but I prefer it this way. I’m naive. Probably, but I’ll live with that. I am dismissed. ‘Well I’m busy too,’ he says ‘the man is coming for the walking stick, I need some advice about pricing…’. I have no interest in talking to him about his walking stick, or how to apply for student loans, or how much they are, or whether I can use my contacts at the college to get him some extra financial aid. I say sorry, but I’ve got to go. After I hang up I’m wrung out. I don’t know if I’m good, or bad, or I’m broken or righteous. I know that whatever I do or say or think I’m making a choice, a moral choice, a choice with huge implications, I’m paralysed by the responsibility for something 60 years of trauma in the making, something I only have the privilege to know about because I was stupid enough to visit twice in two years.

I am imagining my dad. Waiting with his badly made walking stick for a man who may or may not be real. Filling out his student loan forms. So high he doesn’t know he’s hungry. Shuttered away from the bloated mutilated body of his dog outside the only door to his home, which he can’t pay for. So fragile but so powerful in destructive ability. I’m imagining him waiting for me to call. I’m imagining him lining up his next strategy if I don’t. I’m imagining him thinking about me, who I am, how to manipulate me. I’m imagining me, 11 years old, sitting on the step outside my house in the morning, waiting for him to arrive on his bike like he said and eventually going inside at bedtime. Me, 18, running away to an Art College in the country which would be my home and safe place for the next 10 years. I’m imagining me, six months on from now, the life I have built to escape from him, fully flayed open - bloating and stinking, because everyone is too afraid to bury it.

[mrjohnangulo]

Nova Eroica California 2019

Photo: Paolo Penni Martelli

  Now I’m a mother, I’m trying to decrease the amount of time I spend travelling, or more accurately,  minimise the length of trips that I go on. I’m fortunate in that I have an understanding husband who races bikes himself, but nonetheless, I don’t want to spend more time away than I do in Devon – I love my life here and my little girl.

Saying that, an invite to ride Nova Eroica in California was one I just couldn’t turn down; I’ve always been a big fan of the west coast of America and I’m feeling an ever increasing draw towards gravel racing.

    Saying yes to the trip, a week long adventure that would include bikepacking, Nova Eroica itself and vintage ride Eroica California meant I had to wave goodbye to any idea of racing Mission Crit  as two visits to the US in one month were out of the question. But honestly, deciding whether to do a 40-minute crit in San Francisco or several days of bikepacking and not one, but two gravel events didn’t take much time.

The bikepacking trip I’ll get around to writing about – it’s kind of a daunting prospect given how epic it was. I have so many ideas for articles to share with you guys but no time to write them. But anyway, back to the topic at hand – Nova.

  Photo: John Prolly/ The Radavist

  Nova Eroica grew from the original Eroica event in Tuscany, a day-long, fun filled but challenging ride that makes use of the area’s numerous strada bianche (gravel roads), linking multiple fun tracks together with fast rolling tarmac segments. The original event is done on vintage bikes but some clever person had the idea that it would be fun to ride the course on modern gravel bikes too, so Nova Eroica was born. It’s become very successful in its own right, partly due to an increase in people riding gravel but also because the Eroica guys and girls know how to put on a good event and only ever do the rides in exceptionally pretty places.

The base for Cali’s Nova was Cambria, a cute little beach town between San Francisco and Los Angeles with clapper-boarded stores along its kind of arty high street. When I first arrived it seemed so California that I questioned whether it was a real town or the kind of place that only exists to serve tourists. It was almost a pastiche. But this gentle place with its health food store, ice-cream shops, antiques stores and cafes was indeed reality for some lucky people.

    We were staying in a large house away from the town centre but fairly close to the beach so stocked up on groceries at the frighteningly expensive organic store the night before. I’m not a crazy fussy eater but I do like to have granola/oatmeal yoghurt and eggs before I do a long ride; it really helps me out if I fuel properly as I seem to burn through food stupidly quickly. You should see how much I eat.

Down at the event village we attached number and whatnot. I was part of a party of riders that included Sami Sauri, Gus Morten, Bike Snob aka Ebem, Brad Hammonds from Far Ride, Chas of Mash fame and frame builders Mattias (Legor Cicli) and Matty (Crust Bikes) so we hatched a vague plan to take it easy and enjoy the food and wine we’d been promised at the checkpoints. But as soon as we started, several of us got rather overexcited and began racing, legs be damned!

As an excitable bike racer myself, I couldn’t resist going with the front group and blasting straight up the hill out of Cambria. Heading towards Morro Bay, I clung on for dear life riding way above threshold, meaning a far higher power output than I can sustain for a long period of time. It was great fun but I realised after a while that I didn’t want the day to go by in a blur of torturous pain; doing well is in itself fun but this wasn’t really a race I had any chance at winning anyway. I’d seen pro racer Alison Tetrick looking at me in the lead peloton, almost as though she was sizing me up but she really needn’t have worried.

    The route was a little over 125km long with about 2000m of climbing. After the coast road we headed inland, straight up a hill that gave incredible views of the ocean and a first glimpse of what was to come – sun-kissed roads snaking their way through rolling hills. Following Santa Rita road’s undulations, before long the asphalt ran out and we enjoyed a solid ten mile segment of gravel.

After a fast highway segment (and a rest stop) we hit the first tough gravel climb – Kiler canyon – where we slowly passed a bemused looking local family who’d dragged chairs out of their home to watch us. It was hot and extremely tough, and with several days bikepacking in my legs (and jet lag) I found it really hard going but at the top, all was forgiven.

The next segment was on tarmac but none the worse for it – the road took us past picket fences, majestic looking horses and vineyards offering tasting menus. It was clearly a prosperous part of the area; even the grass looked rich. My legs didn’t like it as much as my eyes did – I tried to go hard up each small rise (and managed it) but it hurt.

    After our food stop it was on to Klau Mine road and more dirt then we followed a river through Cypress Mountain Drive. The gravel was hard packed and easy to ride making a ‘gravel bike’ barely necessary though I certainly enjoyed the comfort of the Specialized Diverge I was riding. Unbeknownst to me, there was still a very hard climb to come, Cypress Mountain Drive which felt like the  the hardest of the day, though that may have been as I was tired. The view from the top made it worth it though – luscious plump green hills as far as the eye could see.

The gravel descent that followed hugged the hillsides curves and I grinned by way down, trying not to get too overexcited as the Diverge actually has the brakes the wrong way round (for me). We popped out onto a tarmac road draped over yet more ridiculously perfect green hills, continuing our epic descent further, spirits sky high.

The final segment down Santa Rosa creek road was amongst my favourites – bucolic farmland with hills rising either side. Rarely straight, the road was superbly fun to ride, was traffic-free and just ridiculously scenic. Add in the fact we knew beer would soon be hours and our moods elavated yet further!

All in all, Nov dished up one of the best rides I’ve ever been on. If you’d like to see more, check out my video:

    What other gravel events and rides should I try to do? Got any recommendations?    

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[fleabite531]

An interesting read on habits and priorities has coincided with the end of winter and me feeling the call of the road.

As the air is warmer and there is more daylight the wind feels to pull me even more incessantly. “Come fly with me” it sings. Oh how I want so much that freedom. I feel it whichever way I travel. Just being on the move gives me calm and contentment. Hiking through mountain passes. Flying. Train journeys. Hitchhiking. And since lejog bicycle is now my favourite method.

On my bike, with my camping gear strapped to the pannier rack, is as close to independence as I can currently get. I always have enjoyed minimising the amount of money I need to use – I can and have fed myself for nothing. When I had a (98cc) motorbike that wasn’t so bad as I could travel tens of miles on very little petrol, and always wheel it around. Cars for me feel clumsy and, though offer some liberation, require a lot more upkeep and input. I have to plan more for a car. On my bike there’s not many places I can’t take it. I can lift it up steps or over gates. I can wheel it over foot bridges or onto tiny foot passenger boats. I don’t need to spend money on special fuel for it or to take it on ferries or trains. And I feel this connection to the geography of a place – the contours and bends and flows.

I love feeling my legs gain seven league boots, that my noble steed is carrying my camping gear without difficulty. Its so frigging exuberant to pump to the top of a hill and then fly down the other side. To find a few square metres out of plain sight to camp for the night. To know that the next day I’ll pack up my things and set off somewhere new. To explore new places.

The connection to the “habits and priorities” link above? Just that I was hungrily looking at my calendar for the months ahead, desperate to at least find a few days I could go for a trip on. Living in Glasgow makes it pretty easy to get into the mountains with minimal money/planning. And yet I can only see a few days possibility until the end of May.

I don’t prioritise this. And yet it is the time I am happiest, fulfilled, at peace, joyous. I can almost breathe the fresh air just thinking about it. The sun on my skin. The wind in my face. The endless beauty of the unknown world ahead. The challenges and satisfactions of life on the road.

Partly I allow myself to be booked up because other things do require more advance planning than taking myself off into the countryside. Visiting other countries requires flights and visas. There’s large-scale camps, festivals, conferences, gatherings which all have dates set in advance. And so my calendar is filled with all these things that I definitely want to do, and am excited about. But none of them are quite as great as being on my own, or with 1 or 2 special companions, out in the natural world on an adventure.

I have a really great life. I can’t believe how lucky I am. 14 year old me is delighted! I work one day a week and have a home in the sky. I have wonderful connections, friends, lovers, family. I go dancing and to gigs and to fascinating public science talks and museums. I have secure work and housing. I am relatively healthy and able bodied.

I’m not really moaning. I guess I’m just documenting that I need to prioritise keeping my calendar less full, reduce my commitments, increase my free time. And then I can take advantage of the blessings I have and get out on my bike, tent strapped to the back, spontaneously and frequently. I do only need to work a Sunday to cover my rent and bills.

The nagging doubts, the guilt I have are all about how yes this is nice for me. But I am in such a minority to be able to live such a charmed life. That whilst I am having my jollies war and borders and racism are destroying lives. Austerity rips life sustaining benefits from those that need them. Carbon dioxide levels increase in the atmosphere. Capitalism immiserates.

But then what am I doing about any of those things really now? I struggle to even write an email or organise a meeting about politics or activism. I have this big block and I’m not very functional around politics at the moment. Haven’t really been since I was in Bhopal. I’m at a very low efficiency. Things that would have taken me an hour now take me a whole day and a lot of mental energy. Going to meetings fills me with dread. Maybe I should just accept that I’m not really making much of a difference in the world and give up and be selfish?

Oh I don’t know. I’m sure its all just balance and all. This has gotten way deeper and introspective than I planned. I guess this is my journal so its ok. Sorry if anyone else is reading this expecting something less navel gazing!

Have some pics of my bike to finish. How could that not cheer anyone up? ;)

Habits, priorities and trying to work out why I don’t ensure I get out onto my bike camping more often. An interesting read on habits and priorities has coincided with the end of winter and me feeling the call of the road.