The Roquefort Files

The Roquefort Files are currently on holiday tour with Coba Fynn in Australia. More on that soon, but first a post about my first cyclocross race. You might want to skip this one if the bike blogging isn’t up your alley! As I stood by the chip van with a lorne sausage roll in one [...]

There’s a cycle clothing company called Rapha which professes to cleave to a romantic view of cycling as a kind of purifying ritual, where man attacks col armed with a boutique steel road bike and clad in vintage-aping merino sportswear and emerges sweaty and reborn at the top. The Rapha website is thus awash with [...]

It is just after midnight and I can’t sleep, so I’m lying on the couch and listening to Mogwai’s incomparably bombastic, optimistic magnum opus Mogwai Fear Satan. The music swells and fades and batters and sighs; it is a song that demands attention. Earlier tonight I did my first cycle race, the Edinburgh 48 in [...]

This biking thing is getting out of hand. Last Wednesday I slunk away from my desk half an hour early, got changed into my cycling gear in the disabled toilet (fewer passers-by to remark on the lycra, you see) and headed downstairs to unlock my bike. I was off to the village of Kirkliston (tr. [...]

I was back in Fife last weekend for my sister’s 30th birthday. My Dad has finally tumbled to the fact that cans of beer left in a draughty cupboard for a couple of hours before a shindig do not become chilled to any perceptible degree, and so this time round a pair of ice-laden pails [...]

(This post comes from the typing-up-loose-ends department.) You may recall that I bought an old Peugeot racing bike in Vancouver with the object of converting it to singlespeed. Well, the path to singlespeed enlightenment does not always run smooth, as I found out to my cost. (I will admit that I did not bear that [...]

I am, quite literally, back in the house. Our September road trip is finally documented — exhaustively so, and now with extra free photographs in most entries — and normality has ruled during the four months since then. Many birthdays, for instance, have come and gone. A chronological subset follows: Me Chris Neil Devon Jesus [...]

The second week of the diving class came and went without a hitch, but before the final open water dives, there was one last cycling endeavour to be had. I’d met a guy called John at lunch in the office a few times. We’d chatted a bit about the Tour de France as it had [...]

The MS bike ride I mentioned before fell on the Sunday in the middle of the diving course. I hauled myself out of bed at an ungodly hour that morning (that’s one aspect of Vanouver’s outdoor fetish I could do without) to an uncharacteristically grey sky and spent a while swithering over whether to go [...]

After a relatively sedate July, August went a bit nuts. First up was the longest bike ride of my life*, undertaken with the Vancouver Bicycle Club. I met up with the few hardcore members (of the club, I mean) taking part, on the far side of downtown Vancouver. We headed through Stanley Park and up [...]