Someone said to me yesterday, ‘Only you could start two separate blogs on the same day. Talk about setting yourself up to fail.’ *
I lied in the first line. No one said this to me. My own brain said it to me but I think it sounds better if I pretend I had an actual conversation with someone rather than reveal a snippet from the incessant coffee shop babble that goes on inside my skull throughout my waking hours.
Here we are, then, the difficult second blog post.
Earlier I ran through a quick shortlist of potential subjects and my brain gave me the following feedback: Too personal; too boring; too depressing; too soon.
I haven’t worked out what this is even going to be yet, or even if it’s going to be anything at all, so for now it may just be a run-down of what I’ve been doing, which is currently not all that much other than getting ready for the first three nights of The Cycling Podcast’s Grand Tour of (Parts Of) Britain.
We added the (Parts Of) in brackets when we started getting comments on social media asking why we were neglecting the south west, Wales, East Anglia, the north east and so on. The short answer to that is that the publishers of our book (A Journey Through the Cycling Year), who organised the tour, were juggling many different factors including, but not limited to, our availability, venues that were the right size, affordable and willing to be our hosts, and the travel logistics. If the next week or so goes well and we ever do anything like this again we will ask the tour organisers to prioritise areas we’ve been unable to reach this time, but in the meantime I’ll never make a smart comment about the Tour of Britain route or the length of transfers on that race ever again. The planning and logistics of our little tour have made me go cross-eyed at times and I’ve barely had to do anything apart from say yes or no to things.
If I lose the document with all my train ticket reference numbers on it between now and a week on Saturday you’ll find me rocking backwards and forwards weeping on the platform of a railway station somewhere in (a part of) Britain.
That’s if the trains are running, of course. Tomorrow night we are at The Lowry theatre in Salford. Richard and François will fly in from France and Orla and I will take the train from Euston. With the weather people forecasting heavy snow across parts of the country we could be in for a bit of an adventure but with a bit of luck we’ll get there in time to go on stage and if it goes spectacularly wrong at least I’ll have something amusing to write about in the slightly less difficult third blog.
Our Edinburgh show on Thursday has sold out but if you want to come to Salford, Glasgow, Nottingham, Hackney, Leeds or Sheffield check out the details here.
* For anyone who is interested in football, and more specifically Watford’s attempts at football, I’ve revived my blog about the Hornets. It’s here if you want to read it.