Blog No. 3 of 17 (or thereabouts)
The insidious drip, drip, drip of a weekly dose of Top Gear has obviously got to me. Now, I may be a speed freak, but I'm no petrolhead, having strictly adhered to acquiring jalopy after jalopy after clown car. But the idiotic Hamster, Jezza and Slowpoke May get as close to being a televisual dose of We Are Klang as any performers currently on TV. And for all of you huffing and puffing in disgust at either group's foolish antics ... get knotted, you can never have enough adult silliness on the box. I don't give a stuff about the cars, I really don't - but the mayhem of the challenges (staged or serendipitous) is a blissful watch. And yet, and yet ... today, I felt a stirring as I saw a vehicle up ahead on the A3 like nothing I can remember seeing before. It wasn't even recognizably of its marque. It gleamed silver in the blazing sun (it was proper 'ot today) and once me eyes caught its perfect voluptuous lines they locked on lasciviously. Guiltily, I've even looked it up online ... but as with porn, it's no substitute for the real thing in the flesh. It's not just lust, this Mercedes also has my heart, well, that bit of it reserved for car-love which has lain dormant all these years. Mercedes SLS AMG, you are extraordinarily lovely and I'm giddy from gazing at you, your visceral and sensual effect is as bewitching as it is startling. But with prices starting at 149.000 Euros, unless I win the lottery, I know I'll never sit in your luxurious leather lap.
So ... for a blog encouraging you to join in a cycle-ride, I've been somewhat sidetracked. I'm supposed to be ramping up my fitness at lightning speed (from a very dubious start two days ago) in order to participate in Steven the UniCyclist's lunatic attempt to study with the Open University (http://www.open.ac.uk/) while pedalling his way around Europe, visiting 50 capitals en route (http://www.unicycle50.com/). London will be his second one (not his first as I suggested yesterday) after Douglas, the capital of the Isle of Man (Steven's starting point next Thursday).
Today, I managed a walk. Yes, a walk, a plain simple walk. Whoop-de-do. It was a very nice walk on Mare Hill Common high in the Surrey Hills, but any health benefits were wiped out by the straight-from-the-oven cheese scones at the impossibly eccentric Fanny's Farm Shop Café (http://www.fannysfarmshop.co.uk/) - a place so uncompromisingly bizarre I would urge you to visit should you ever come within a whiff of Junction 8 of the M25. The website is amateurish and dull, whereas the place itself fizzes with homegrown creativity which will baffle and delight in equal measure. Get there before health and safety or Brussels bureacrats interfere, but go easy on the coffee, it's brain-meltingly strong.
When I sought to complete my evening journey to work on a Boris-bike, as will become my target in the next couple of weeks - there were no bikes on the stand, so I took the tube ... and the lift was there as I walked into the office, so no stairs either. I think I'm in negative-equity where exercise is concerned today, so if a 55-mile bike ride seems impossibly ambitious to you, your fitness probably matches mine and you should join us for the communal ride on April 6th http://www.facebook.com/?ref=hp#!/event.php?eid=174564295907447
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