“Pay some road tax” – a modest proposal

Christ. This shameful incident, if true, should at least lead to a driving ban for someone who shouldn’t be allowed near a vehicle. I’d like to see motorists who hit cyclists forced to cycle for a year or two as part of their re-education. Snip:

I’ve been told to “pay road tax” more times than I can remember, though sadly explaining the intricacies of road taxation – deftly explained by the excellent site I Pay Road Tax – takes longer than the few seconds you get on the road. And when this entitlement dehumanises cyclists to the extent someone is happy to excuse hitting a cyclist by explaining they don’t believe they should be on the road at all, it becomes more than an annoyance – it’s an active danger.

via Twitter hit-and-run boast shows dangers of ‘road tax’ entitlement | Dawn Foster | Environment | guardian.co.uk.

You can’t actually win an argument with someone who is fundamentally irrational in their hatred and ignorant of the facts. This is the problem the teaching profession has with Michael Gove. My own modest proposal re “road tax” would be that road tax (which hasn’t existed for 70 years) should actually be re-introduced, and should be paid by all road users, including cyclists. And it shouldn’t be a flat rate, nor based on carbon emissions as the VED is now. It should be based on the amount of damage a vehicle is likely to do to the road.

I propose a simple formula based on kerb weight (in metric tonnes, as reported by manufacturers) and tyre width. This would mean that lighter vehicles with skinny tyres would pay less than heavy vehicles with fat tyres. It would make road tax really quite expensive, but the surplus over what is raised now could actually be used to repair and maintain roads, which is something that hasn’t been happening for about 25 years.

Example: My VW Touran, which has a kerb weight of 1.5 metric tonnes and has 205 mm tyres, would cost £307 per year to use on the public roads. A lot more than I currently pay, but a reasonable measure of the impact the vehicle has on the road. The amount of miles you drive and your driving style would determine the amount of additional (fuel) tax you pay for motoring.

A Volvo XC90 (2.1 tonnes, approx) with 255 mm tyres would cost £535 per year.

A Honda Jazz (1 tonne, approx) with 185 mm tyres would cost £185 per year.

My bicycle, which weighs about 0.013 tonnes and has 23 mm tyres, would cost about 30 pence per year to use on the road. Which I would, of course, be happy to pay, just so I could wave my tax disc in the face of shit-for-brains motorist fuckwits.

I’ve got no time, by the way, for those who complain about the cost of motoring, and whine about fuel tax etc. Motoring is still too cheap compared to its actual cost to society and the planet.

Country albums: new release roundup

Here’s a selection of virtual platters that have been virtually spinning on my virtual turntable in the past couple of months.

Connor Christian & Southern Gothic – New Hometown

This virtual double album offers 19 tracks for the bargain price of £6.99. Buy it now! Seriously, if you like a bit of Southern rock, this will be your cup of meat and it’s worth £7 of anyone’s money. Sounding not unlike a passionate young Elton John in his slightly countrified early 70s pomp, this is a pleasant listen and a lot of fun. Standout tracks are “Sheets Down”, “(She’s) My Salvation”, “16 Bars” and the bonus track “Be Alright”. It’s a corker.

Ashley Monroe – Like a Rose

For some reason this is on iTunes twice, once at £5.99 and once at £7.99. Rose is one of the Pistol Annies, and this is a traditional-sounding country album with a little bit of an edge (“Weed Instead of Roses” is the marker for this). Produced by Vince Gill, his involvement is probably all you should need to know about the quality of Monroe’s singing and songwriting. Standout tracks include the title number, “She’s Driving Me Out of Your Mind”, “Two Weeks Late”, and the duet with Blake Shelton, “You Ain’t Dolly (And You Ain’t Porter)”.

Blake Shelton – Based on a True Story

Talking of Shelton, his new one is also worth a listen. I’m a little uncomfortable with Shelton’s celebrations of Red State attitudes (he can take a hike with “Granddaddy’s Gun” for a start), but away from all that shit, he’s got a strong, passionate voice and the production is the kind of top-drawer commercial fare I love, with a song selection to match.

Gretchen Wilson – Right on Time

Also just out, Gretchen Wilson’s long-awaited new record is strong on the grit and the blues, infused with country and rock and has enough variety to keep surprising you. There’s a little weed in the air on this one, too (“Grandma”) and some redneck attitudes (“Get Outta My Yard”, “My Truck”), but this strong set veers between hard rock (“Crazy”) and night club jazz/blues (title track) with Wilson’s great voice proving her versatility. A little bit Janice Joplin and a little bit herself, you have to wonder at the music industry when Sony would drop an artist like this.

Kacey Musgraves – Same Trailer Different Park

Her name was on everyone’s lips this year (no pressure, then), especially following the great single “Merry Go Round”, and the full album was worth waiting for. Just because there was so much buzz, the iTunes version is £8.99 instead of the more usual £7.99 or cheaper, which feels a bit cynical and exploitative. Still, this is a strong set, from the opener “Silver Lining” through numbers like “Blowin’ Smoke”, “Back on the Map”, “Keep it to Yourself” and “Follow Your Arrow”. Musgraves has a great voice, an ear for melody and a witty way with a lyric. It’s an instantly likeable album. Hate those shorts she’s wearing on the cover, though.

Related articles

• Kacey Musgraves Breaks into Country Music (illinois.uloop.com)
• Kacey Musgraves: Same Trailer Different Park (Review) (popmatters.com)

The Domane of dreams in the domain of nightmares

Buckinghamshire has, without doubt, the lowest standard of roads in the civilised world. This perennially Tory heartland has had its infrastructure systematically starved of cash (*by zombies) while at the same time fostering a multiple-car-owning community that habitually chooses to drive 2-tonne vehicles with fat, grippy tyres: tractors, trucks, 4x4s, all of which pound and rip the road surfaces leaving potholes, cracks, subsidence, patches and repairs done on the cheap.

Even when stretches are properly resurfaced, the roads are soon torn up and damaged by farm machinery and other heavy vehicles, which ripple and pull the still-warm tarmac before it even gets a chance to properly set. I remember my uncle, who lives in the States, years ago justifying the popular American use of 4×4 trucks on the grounds that the American roads were in such poor condition that you “had to” drive a truck with big fat tyres. So the worse the roads get, the more people drive heavy cars, and the worse the roads get.

Cycling these roads is a nightmare.

I’ve hit stones and got a puncture. I’ve dropped the front wheel into cracks and holes and got a puncture. I’ve felt the back wheel spinning without grip on a bumpy surface as I tried to dig in to get up a hill. I’ve exited a village and found – on that stretch of road where motorists depress the accelerator when leaving a 30 mph zone and the surface tears up where the tyres grip – that there was literally nowhere on the road, not on the edge and not in the middle, where it was safe for a skinny road bike tyre.

Cyclists pay their taxes, too, you know. There’s VAT on the bike and all its accessories and the fancy clothes, the shoes, the pedals, the inner tubes. And I pay income tax and I pay the emissions tax on my car and fuel tax on the fuel I put in it. And I would like there to be somewhere safe to put a bike on these roads.

There are some stretches, in a car you’d think the surface was in pretty good nick, but it’s not. It’s rippled, and as you bounce across the ripples, your bike starts to shake and resonate, just out of phase or something, and you can’t put any speed down.

On my old bike, riding around Silverstone one time, I noticed how I was fully 2 mph faster on a smooth bit of dual carriageway than I was on the rough and rippled country back road that fed into it. This was on the flat. So I’m pretty sure that the poor road surface drains the energy from my legs.

Which is why I’m now yearning for a Trek Domane. These bikes are built for the classics, those cycle races on cobbled roads and other primitive surfaces. They have specially designed front forks and a clever frame that offers the benefit of a floating suspension without sapping power. I’ve read enough about the pro version to know that the technology works, and it would seem to be perfect for a 50-something male who needs a bit more comfort, a bit less back and hip pain, on fitness rides.

The Domane 2.3 has an aluminium frame (less flexible than carbon, so they say) but has the IsoSpeed decoupler and front fork as well as some Shimano 105 components which are several orders of magnitude better than the Shimano Sora components on my fairly entry-level (£700-750) Trek 1.2. The Domane costs £1200, which is a lot of money for me.

Then again, the Domane 4.3 has more or less everything the same as the 2.3 but it has a carbon frame. It costs £600 more. £1800 takes me into dream bike territory, but I do wonder. If you were to spend the £600 on the aluminium model, by upgrading the wheels and saddle, say, I wonder if it wouldn’t then be the better bike for the money? I don’t know this of course, because I’m well outside my zone of competency. What I will say is, I prefer the look of the aluminium one. The black and grey paint job of the carbon one is depressing. Ideally, I’d like something in Bianchi green, but you can’t get that with a Trek built for men.

But I’m dreaming. Because the idea of having a bike that would smooth out the bumps and holes, and glide over the ripples, and give me back some of that energy I’m losing to the road surface? That seems like it would be something worth having.

*I inserted “by zombies” to indicate my awareness of my use of the passive voice there.

Related articles

• Trek Domane: Product Review (cyclecentre.wordpress.com)
• Trek Domane- Your King of the Classics (thebikelane.wordpress.com)
• The bike that won Flanders (escapethedesk.wordpress.com)
• Trek Domane & Cancellara Are A Win Win! (dedhambike.wordpress.com)
• Cycling in Suffolk: Britain’s most beautiful ride? (frequentlyarsed.wordpress.com)

The pizza

Summer’s here* and the time is right for barbecuing pizza.

In my greedy dreams of lottery winning extravagance, I have a proper wood-burning pizza oven in the back yard, maybe six or seven of them, but in reality I’ll never be able to justify the expense or afford one.

And in reality, nobody who isn’t running an actual restaurant really needs one.

I’ve got a Weber gas barbecue. I like a gas barbecue because you can light it and be cooking within 10 minutes and so you use it more often. It’s great for cooking things like salmon and other smelly foods without stinking out the kitchen. And if you want smoke, there are loads of solutions, like the wood wrappings or even a grilling plank. A gas barbecue is not a thing that you’ll only use on the very occasional sunny day.

For pizza, you just need a stone. The Weber stone I have is a 1cm thick circle of granite. It just fits onto my rectangular grill. After the dough has proved, you light it up, lower the lid, and let it warm up while you prepare the pizza.

I use Caputo pizza flour, which is available in red and blue varieties. The blue makes for a crispier crust; the red makes a crust that is still crispy, but also has enough softness for a satisfying chew. For three family-sized pizzas, I use 450g of this flour, which needs water to the tune of 65% the weight of the flour. That’s about 293 ml or 293g of water. For pizza, I just use warm tap water, or filtered water slightly warmed in the microwave. You need a sachet of instant yeast (or 2 teaspoons), 1.5 teaspoons of salt, and a teaspoon of sugar.

I put the salt and sugar on one side of the flour and the yeast on the other. I add the water and then mix the dough with a dough hook on my mixer for 5-10 minutes. When it’s nice and stretchy, I pour in a little olive oil, just to stop it sticking to the sides of the bowl. I then cover it in cling film and put the dough in a warm place for about an hour, though 45 minutes is usually long enough on a warm day.

When the dough has risen, it’s time to light the barbecue and let the stone warm up.

Now you gently knock back the sough, divide it into three balls, and set two aside. They will continue to rise a bit. If you have the time, it’s a good idea to wait 15 minutes at this stage to let some air pockets appear in the first dough ball.

Now, sprinkle flour on the side and roll it out. Have a pizza peel ready. I sprinkle flour and/or semolina and/or cornmeal on the peel, which helps the pizza to slide off. Flatten your dough ball with a rolling pin and stretch it out into a circle that’s as big as your peel or just smaller than your pizza stone. You can also stretch it by hand.

Put the stretched dough circle on the peel. Now spread on about 2 generous spoonfulls of tomato sauce. I generally do either one of the following: use unadulterated sundried tomato paste, or a mixture of passata and sundried tomato paste. You don’t want anything too watery. Some people swear by fresh basil: I don’t. I don’t even like it. I think the best herb to sprinkle on at this stage is dried marjoram. Dried, because it has a better flavour.

Now comes the cheese. Yes, you can get expensive little balls of buffalo mozzarella, but for a more reasonable price, a packet of grated mozzarella. 250g for three pizzas: don’t go overboard. Mozzarella is a satisfyingly melty cheese, but has no real flavour. For flavour, mix with a little grated gruyere. Waitrose sell it already grated; nobody else does. You don’t need much, but it really improves the overall flavour.

Now top the cheese with your choice of toppings. I use thin slices of pepper, (sometimes) fresh tomato, pineapple (wife and kids insist), (sometimes) sliced shallot or onion, sliced black olives ( half the pizza only because kids don’t like them), slices of bacon, ham, chorizo, pepperoni, anchovies (fresh from the deli counter is less salty than from a jar), etc. Bacon is better than ham, unless the ham has a really strong flavour. The trick is: not too much of anything, and vary as much as you can within your budget.

You might consider a drizzle of olive oil, but it’s not compulsory.

By now, the pizza stone is hot and the barbecue should be around 200 degrees C. It can get hotter, but doesn’t really need to. Slide the first pizza onto the stone and close the lid. While it’s cooking, get the second pizza ready.

To ring the changes, the middle pizza is a tarte flambée, with (half fat) creme fraiche and more gruyere than mozzarella. Bacon and onion/shallots is all you really need, though you can add other toppings. Slices or dices of (pre-cooked) potato is good, and leave off the pineapple.

The first pizza should be done within ten minutes. The second and third should take less time, as the barbecue gets hotter. Be careful with the third, because the base can burn if you leave it as long as ten minutes.

As you slice it, you’ll get a satisfying crunchy sound. The top will be perfectly cooked, the bottom crispy and (especially with the red Caputo) each slice will be good and chewy.

Cycling in Suffolk: Britain’s most beautiful ride?

The Times made the claim that the ride from Orford to Southwold is Britain’s most beautiful, and so, after a long time thinking about whether it would be worth it, we took a bank holiday trip down to Suffolk with a couple of bikes. Was it worth it?

Short answer: no.

Partly this is because I was unable to follow the route suggested by the Times (they don’t really give precise enough directions, for a start). Mine is a road bike with skinny tyres, and the route taken by the Times journalist and his friend was along bridleways and other rough paths, for which you need a hybrid at the least and probably something with chunky tyres. I won’t have one of those heavyweight things in the house. I find it hard enough to carry my own weight, thanks, let alone a suspension and unnecessarily fat rubber.

So my problem was in plotting a route suitable for me on a road bike whilst still avoiding the busy roads on a bank holiday Monday.

It wasn’t easy. I had four (count ‘em) apps on my phone that offered various routing options. None of them seemed ideal. Google tried to get me to take a ferry. I didn’t want to do that. My main sat nav (Co-Pilot Live) spent too much time on main roads. Apple Maps doesn’t even offer cycling options, and Bike Hub – a dedicated cycle route app – offered all kinds of mixed up confusion.

The thing about Bike Hub is, it has a lot of open source mapping and cycling routes, and it even offers four different styles of routing, but you have to download the map tiles in advance – especially before going to signal-free Suffolk. I had downloaded some map tiles, but the app is so awkward to use (the interface telling you to select which bit of the map you want gets in the way of the bit of the map you want – and you can’t dismiss it) that I actually ran out of tiles before I’d reached my destination.

That said, Bike Hub works all right, with an irritating robotic voice (American accent – why?) giving you very precise instructions. It was all very reassuring, until we ran out of map tiles. And then we just got a fixed overview screen which stopped updating.

But I ended up confused. The area has a number of official cycling routes (Regional Routes 41 and 42, for example), but these don’t really go where you want to go. And the route used by The Times was nothing like, I don’t think. I didn’t get lost, but Bike Hub did end up routing me up a farm track and over grassy hills with a view of Sizewell, before plunging us through an RSPB reserve in woodland, complete with rough sandy paths, none of which were suitable for a road bike. By this time, too, the map tiles had run out and we were navigating by irritating robot voice alone, which (thank goodness) eventually took us onto the road into Dunwich.

We rode two shifts. Daughter #2 did the first 17 miles, from Orford to Dunwich. It was pleasant enough, with just about 500 metres spent on busy main roads, and just one fuckwit in an Audi coming at us round a bend on a single track road as if there would never be anything coming the other way. Audi drivers are too busy stroking their cocks to hold the steering wheel as well.

 

This part of the trip went well, apart from the last couple of miles off the tarmac. After fish and chips at Dunwich, daughter #1 took over for the last bit to Southwold. This was less fun. It was hillier, windier, and there was more traffic. Nothing too scary, apart from the obligatory Audi driver who decided he couldn’t wait to overtake us, in spite of the presence of oncoming traffic on a narrow road. Honestly, the risks some people are willing to take rather than wait, what, ten seconds? Boggles the mind.

By this time, my phone battery was flat, so I had to use my inner sense of direction to get off the busy main road and take a back road which led to the narrow lane (not suitable for motors) that takes you to a footbridge into Southwold.

Most beautiful ride? In the sense that the roads were nice and flat and it was a pleasant, sunny day, maybe. The condition of the roads in Suffolk is miles better than Buckinghamshire. But I was a long way from the bridleways and byways used by the Times, so no. And, believe me, nothing is going to be so beautiful that it’s worth the 6-hour round trip.

And there’s the rub. Cycling is fantastic, but driving for hours with your bike on top of the car in order to ride a particular bit of countryside is complete madness. So I won’t do it again. Sure, I’m taking the bike to France this summer holiday, but that’s something different. I’ll still be based in one location and riding out from there, not driving somewhere in order to ride a bit then drive back.

The fish & chips at Dunwich were great, by the way, though not necessarily the best that the area had to offer. But Dunwich coincided nicely with about lunchtime. As for Southwold, well, it was breezy and the sea was brown.

Final word: there’s a gap in the market for a really decent bike-dedicated sat nav that takes account of both hills, less travelled routes, and the differences between skinny and fat tyres. Oh, and motorists: if you’re not actually pedalling your car, you can afford to slow down and/or wait a few seconds.

 

Non-news update news update

BBC iPlayer (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

I’m a fortnight into my news holiday. I deleted the folder of bookmarks I have in my browser that took me to the front pages of three of the broadsheets, the BBC, and other news sites. I haven’t switched on the Today programme in the morning, nor the PM programme in the afternoon. I haven’t listened to Richard Bacon or Drive on the drive home from work.

I removed Tweetbot from the home screen of my iPhone and iPad, and relegated it to the last screen, along with all the Apple shit you can’t delete, like Stocks and Game Centre.

I have been on the Twitter, but mainly reading things from people I’ve known the longest. I flick through the updates rapidly, no longer spending the time to read each one. I haven’t followed any links to news stories, opinion columns, or newsy blogs.

I’ve been aware of things happening. Bombs, earthquakes, collapsing buildings. I know about these things, but they seem distant and abstract, like all the other bombings, earthquakes and collapsing buildings there have been in my life. Have I ever been able to do anything about these events, which seem tailor-made for news? Does knowing about an earthquake stop the earth shaking?

It’s odd to see the snarky comments sometimes before being aware of what they relate to. People make jokes about boycotting Primark, and you know it must relate to something in the news, but the connection doesn’t come immediately. You realise how pointless it is to listen to The News Quiz, or watch Have I Got News For You.

Two weeks in, and I don’t think I’ll be putting the browser bookmarks back any time soon. I’ve enjoyed finding things on the Radio iPlayer and listening to them instead of the news. I won’t go back to the Today programme, with its dreadful agenda-setting drivel-driven manufactured debates.

I do miss Eddie Mair. I don’t miss Kermode and Mayo. I tried to listen to their podcast, which edits out the news, but Kermode is so fucking irritating, isn’t he? Labouring and repeating every point like a sledgehammer smashing into a carpet tack.

When the month is up, I will allow myself to listen to Eddie Mair on PM, and I will continue to skim across the surface of the Twitter, but that will be all.

Irritating Country Songs: Truck No

Nice mullet, Blake (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

Older readers will be aware that I love country music, but every now and then an artist I like will include a song that is truly irritating, horrible, and even nasty.

Step forward Blake Shelton, who panders to the kind of right-wing ignoramus who dismisses environmental concerns whilst spouting the kind of self-delusional twaddle exemplified by the song “Green” on his album Startin’ Fires.

Sheets on the clothes line drying
Red Tail hawks a flying
A couple of deer on the timber line
And I know a lot more about cane pole fishing
then I ever will know about carbon emission
And my little corner of the world is doing just fine

I’ve got a hundred acre farm
I’ve got a john deere in my barn
I’ve got a garden in my yard, full of corn, peas and beans
I’ve got a guitar I play unplugged
I’ve got a home-grown girl I love,
And when the summer time hits, we skinny dip in the stream
I was green before green was a thing

The line that really grates (apart from the refrain, to which the response is, no, you’re not green, you twat), is the “my little corner of the world is doing just fine,” which causes the red mist to descend. Yeah, so people are getting flooded out all over, and starving in famine zones and spring doesn’t seem to exist any more, but I’m doing all right.

Fuck off.

Next exhibit, “Real Man” by Kristina Cornell, from her album It’s a Girl Thing

I ain’t looking for no one night stand
A bar fly slipping his ring off his hand
A metrosexual
Intellectual
Sensitive new aged guy

I’m looking for a real man
Looking for a rock
I can hold on to
Someone with a strong hand
And I ain’t gonna stop
‘Til I find him

Yeah, thanks for setting back the 100-year struggle for women’s equality, and the notion that men should be anything other than lumbering hairy troglodytes. Intellectual men not required? Fuck you.

Now we turn to a hideous glorification of pointless binge drinking in Lee Bryce’s “Parking Lot Party”, on his album Hard 2 Love, which also features a hideous titling substitution of the number 2 for the word to, which is indeed hard to love.

At the parking lot party
A tailgate buzz just a sipping’ on suds
Ain’t never too early
To light one up, fill up your cup
Cause there ain’t no party like the pre-party
and after the party is the after-party
At the parking lot party

First of all, just imagine the scene. You’re in a fucking car park with a crowd of sports fans or something, and you’re getting drunk before you go in, so you can get more drunk inside and then even more drunk afterwards. And then drive home? Since most human beings don’t need more than an hour to get completely shit-faced, I just can’t imagine the horror that would ensue from this level of bingeing. Vomit-strewn parking bays and a really bad headache are a certainty, but misery for anyone within earshot is also probable. Jesus wept.

There are more, but the final entry for today has to be Tim McGraw‘s “Truck Yeah”, from his recent release Two Lanes of Freedom.

Let me hear you say, Truck Yeah
Wanna get it jacked up yeah
Let’s crank it on up yeah
With a little bit of luck I can find me a girl with a Truck Yeah
We can love it on up yeah
‘Til the sun comes up yeah
And if you think this life I love is a little too country
Truck Yeah

For fuck’s sake. First of all, the notion of a truck: fuck off with that. Nobody needs one of those who isn’t an actual farmer with actual livestock. Nobody wants to hear your music either, so turn it down. And it appears to me that we’re either at a monster truck rally or at some kind of sporting event where we are, once again, drinking too much and making a nuisance of ourselves.

See, people found Brad Paisley’s “Accidental Racist” offensive for some reason, but this is the kind of stuff that gives me the rage.