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Let’s clear up any misunderstandings about Prologue bike shop

July 15, 2011

Call me a principled fool, but I wouldn’t spend my money in a shop that’s been linked to organised crime. So after months of hearing quite a few eye-popping rumours about Prologue in East Sheen from fairly reliable sources, I decided to do a bit of digging on the interweb.

The good news is that the shop, in its current incarnation under Mark Henley, is perfectly legit. I’ll continue being a customer, and so should you if you value having a decent, friendly local bike shop. The allegations of wrongdoing stem from its two original directors Andrew Neave and Paul O’Connor – both of whom stood down in March and have nothing to do with the business anymore, according to records at Companies House and an assurance I received on the London Dynamo forum from the present Prologue team (you’ll need to be a Dynamo member to access that link).

So what’s been going on with the original directors? Well, in January, a judge ordered Neave and O’Connor to be extradited to Italy over a £344million Mafia money laundering investigation involving a telecoms firm called Fastweb. Part of the CCTV evidence uncovered by the Italian investigation apparently shows Neave with Luigi Marotta, a convicted fraudster known as “the Teflon Don”. (Whoever hands out Mafia nicknames may want to rescind that one: surely “Teflon” is a misnomer after you’ve been caught?)

Neave and O’Connor have an intriguing background. They owned an IT firm called Fulcrum Trading, and O’Connor made the Sunday Times Rich List in 2002 with an estimated wealth of £33million. Neave was also part of a project management company that was sued for €5.3m over alleged unauthorised money transfers and overpayments, although I can’t find the outcome of this dispute. I also have no idea how the Italian case is progressing (very slowly, I suspect, given the standards of the country’s justice system) – but, obviously, Neave and O’Connor are innocent until proven guilty.

A final point to note: everyone I’ve spoken to thought that Bruce Berkeley, who ran the shop, was only the manager. In fact, “David Bruce Berkeley” was also a director. Companies House shows his position was terminated in February.

Anyway, I hope that clears everything up. To reiterate: Prologue is a nice shop with helpful staff, and the present predicament of Neave and O’Connor shouldn’t have any bearing on how the business is perceived. I wish the current team at Prologue all the best.

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A Level-Headed Analysis Of The Great Publishing Mystery Of 2006

July 8, 2011

It’s Tour time, and that can mean only one thing: everyone is making light-hearted observations about cyclists, regardless of whether they like cycling or not. Not me, though. I’m all out of funny this week, thanks to a chronic lack of sleep, an influx of extra-curricular work and probably the biggest IT disaster I’ve ever experienced in an office environment (you don’t want to know – trust me). So I won’t be joining in with the TdF ROFL-fest, thankyouverymuch. Instead, like Romain Feillu frantically running backwards while trying to flag down a team car, I am going to draw attention to myself by going in the opposite direction. That’s right: in the grand tradition of the internets, I shall now take a serious, analytical look at a phenomenon and then blame it all on a convenient scapegoat.

My Big, Serious Analysis relates to the circulations of three cycling magazines over a decade-long period. I spotted the figures sellotaped to the wall of a certain well-known cycling brand’s office more than a year ago, so I immediately took a photo and promptly forgot about it until I found the picture languishing on our hard drive last week. I’m not going to tell you which office it was, but anyone can probably get these figures quite easily. I should mention, however, that I don’t have an association, paid or otherwise, with any of these magazines.

That's it – squint. Or click to make it bigger. It's up to you.

I’ll ignore the mountain bike mags on the right as I don’t know a ruddy thing about them. What interests me are the three road titles: Cycling Plus (Men’s Health on wheels), Cycle Sport (professional cycling news) and Cycling Weekly (a mishmash of the two, with a dash of domestic racing coverage). At first glance, their fortunes seem as divergent as their subject matter. By 2009, Future Publishing’s Cycling Plus had more than doubled its circulation of 2000. The industry’s technical term for this is: HOLY CHRIST. By contrast, IPC’s Cycle Sport lost almost a quarter of its readership in the same period. The industry’s technical term for this is also: HOLY CHRIST. Yet perhaps more surprising is Cycle Sport’s sister mag Cycling Weekly, whose figures have held remarkably steady. So much for its supposed terminal decline – but you can’t believe everything you read on internet forums, can you?

But now look at what happens in 2006. C+ experiences an annual year-on-year increase of only 0.61% while CS loses a whopping 10.53% – but CW goes up 7.16%. All of these are record numbers for the period. So what the flipping hell happened in ’06 to cause these weird jolts?

Well, it was the first full year of Lance Armstrong’s retirement 1.0, which probably explains why CS’s decline only begins in ’06 (sales were steady up until then, with a healthy rise in ’04). But it was also the year Floyd Landis, er, finished the Tour in the fastest time. Post-Tour editions proclaimed him the winner, but he had already tested positive by the time the copies left the printers. (If I remember correctly, even C+ put Landis on the front – an unusual move, given that its cover stars are usually anonymous amateurs.) The internet had made bike mags seem out-of-date before, but never quite so conspicuously, and I think some readers, particularly those of CS, may have been turned away for good. But perhaps some of them also picked up CW more frequently to find out the latest on the twists and turns of his case, which would at least explain the magazine’s biggest annual circulation rise during the decade.

So there you have it. Everything is Floyd’s fault. And Lance’s. Or maybe not. Perhaps it’s fairer to say that big cycling stars can have wildly varying and unpredictable effects on each magazine’s circulation – and there’s nothing mags can do about it unless they choose to ignore them. Which is what, by and large, C+ seems to have done.

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Off again

June 16, 2011

It seems like only a few weeks ago that I did the Nove Colli. That’s because it was only a few weeks ago. And now I’m off on another jaunt, this time with my lighthearted romantical partner Jen. So, once again, they’ll be no Five this week or next. I know, I know – but we’ll all just have to get through this together somehow. Being apart will make us stronger, better people. You’ll see.

Thanks for popping by, and thank you to everyone who has linked to this blog during the past couple of weeks. I will think of you all as we take shelter from the Cornish thunderstorms.

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Arrivederci!

May 19, 2011

Listen, I’d love to chat, but I’m off to Italy for a few days, so there won’t be anything new here this week or next week. I’m riding the Nove Colli with five dozen other Dynamos, and I’ll be writing about it for a magazine. So you’ll get to read about it sometime in the future. In the meantime, and if you can really be bothered (I perfectly understand if you’re tired of the subject), you can have a look at my little postscript to The Berk. Toodle-pip!

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Kim Kardashian’s Konundrum

April 6, 2011

What should Kim Kardashian call her new perfume? It’s been a fortnight since the reality TV fame construct outsourced one of the key tasks that would qualify the “perfumista” part of her made-up job description, but despite receiving more than 8,000 suggestions in the first three hours alone, she has yet to announce the name of her latest smell. Clearly the lady needs a little help, so I’ve come up with a few suggestions of my own.

Konkoktion
Kornukopia
Klueless
Kredible
Kondescension
Krapsody
Kerr-ay-zee Name, Kerr-ay-zeely Gigantic Butt!
Khrist, no
Kan’t Be Bothered To Do This Myself
Kopout
Kweef
Stench Of Desperation
Smells like Dispirited Teens
Who?

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Warning: Experiment In Progress

March 24, 2011

I’m going to do a thing, which I hope will be a regular thing, but if it’s not that funny or interesting then it will quietly become The Thing We Shall Not Speak Of and be banished forever. I’ll put it up tomorrow, so please let me know what you think. Thankyouverymuchly.

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A Small Thank-You…

March 21, 2011

…to everyone who has texted, emailed, tweeted, DM’d, posted on the Dynamo forum and (in the singular case of the club’s cheery Antipodean strongman Roy McGregor) stopped me in the street regarding my previous post. After receiving more than five times my average number of weekly visits, I’m pleased and somewhat surprised that all the messages have been positive. I wasn’t expecting such an unequivocal response, so thanks again. The usual lighthearted nonsense will resume soon. Promise.

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Saturday blight

March 5, 2011

I received a comment about my post on the ropy Ian McEwan novel Saturday this week, and my instinct was to hit the delete button because I knew the nitwit who wrote it had arrived at this blog for a very different reason. Then I realised I may not ever get a chance to publish anything quite so daft ever again, and it sort of ties in with what I’ll be writing about in my next post. So here, for your enjoyment and mine, are the words of some tit called Christopher Parkman in all their glory…

“How else dear boy is a character not going to have a thought ‘artificially placed there by the dullard narrator’? He isn’t real, it’s a novel, the clue is in the word ‘fiction’.

“Have you even read any Woolf? She practically invented that type of leaden psychological prose. What the fuck does expatiation mean anyway, do you mean expiation? You know what I hate? When people use long words that they don’t understand to try and make themselves look clever. Anyway I’m sure that you know better than Salman Rushdie, Clive James and Martin Amis who all regard McEwan as one of the best writers of his generation.”

Well, I was hardly challenging McEwan’s reputation, just expressing an opinion about one novel in particular which even some of his fans seem to think is a bit of a stinker (see comments). Full marks for noticing that “fiction” is stuff that’s made up, but this isn’t just fiction: it is considered to be literature, so it is supposed to use artifice to express some sort of higher truth or insight. To me, Woolf does this and Saturday doesn’t. As for “expatiation”, the word means to write in great detail, which the author does regarding the unease and conflicting opinions of the British public prior to the war with Iraq. “Expiation”, on the other hand, is atonement, which I gather is another of Mr. McEwan’s novels. Still, at least we can agree on one thing: it is annoying when people get unusual words wrong, isn’t it, dear boy?

Having said all that, I don’t think Christopher Parkman actually meant any of the badly-formed thoughts he thwacked into a keyboard with his limp, pudgy paw. Because the fact is, he called me, my friends and acquaintances “c*nts” on Twitter for no good reason, then came over here after I blocked him. So I reckon he was simply after a good old-fashioned interweb anger w*nk, and I sincerely hope he left this blog feeling fully satisfied.

And the reason for him being so narky? He doesn’t like the cycling club I ride with. Yep, it really is that shallow and pathetic. But there are quite a few chippy loners in the two-wheeled community who have a problem with London Dynamo, and I think it’s best I address the ‘Mo hate in one long, er, expatiation, rather than coming back to it in a series of desultory skirmishes like this one. Which is exactly what I intend to do next…

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A Wholly Unbiased Recommendation

January 31, 2011

Perhaps, like me, you enjoy bicycles and reading things, although you refrain from attempting them simultaneously. And maybe you take particular joy striding through the electronically-activated doors of Condor, London’s top bicycle emporium, to peruse the vast collection of cycling-related reading materials on display. Or maybe you’re a bit pushed for time and you’d frankly much rather know where the hell all this is going, for goodness’ sake. Well wonder no more, impatient reader, because issue five of The Ride, the magazine everyone in our home refers to as “kind of like a cycling version of McSweeney’s“, has metaphorically hit the shelves, packed with articles by famous bicycle stars Graeme Obree, David Millar and Michael Barry, as well as great stuff by less well-known people. (I’m firmly in the latter category. Page 102, if you’re interested. It’s sort of about Richmond Park, but kind of isn’t. It’s accompanied by the above illustration, created by The Tree House Press, which you may want to click to experience its full loveliness.) If you’re really too overwhelmed with excitement to wait for your next visit to Gray’s Inn Road, you can purchase a copy here.

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Begin. Again.

December 31, 2010

Firstly, thanks for popping by. Secondly, welcome to my weblog. And thirdly, to any members of a certain cycling club who are thinking, “Get on with it – you’ve already done this,” well, yes, you’re quite right, of course. But that welcome was tailor-made for my London Dynamo chums, whereas this is an off-the-peg, one-size-fits-all “how’s it going” to anyone else who may have stumbled across this bruised peach lodged at the bottom of the world wide wicker basket. So for them, or for you, if you fit the curious-but-slightly-irritated-by-all-this-expositional-guff strata of my readership, I proffer the following explanation.

I set up this blog primarily as an archive of DYNAMITE!, an email newsletter about London Dynamo which I wrote a few years ago. To stall the raising of eyebrows and stifle guffaws, I must point out that the name is unashamedly ironic: there is clearly nothing in the least bit explosive that can be said about predominantly thirtysomething men going round in circles every weekend. It was probably an awareness of bike racing’s concomitant absurdities that contributed to the popularity of DYNAMITE!, and for the few hundred people who enjoyed getting the newsletter every Friday throughout the season, my humble archive is for them. But if, perhaps, you are looking to join a cycling club based in west London, then there are 209 reasons why you should become part of Dynamo, and you can pick as many as you like from the “DYNAMITE! filed” category to your left. No one has more fun than us, and every issue comes with that as a money-back guarantee. (I realise you haven’t given me any cash, but rather than hand some over, it’s probably more expedient and cost-effective for you to just take my word for it.)

Hopefully, the next stage of this blog will be just as much fun. I have lots of opinions and thoughts, many of them not necessarily about cycling, which I increasingly find are not articulated elsewhere, so stick around if you want to be engaged, amused, or distracted, or if you simply want to see a twit fall flat on his bottom beneath an infinitesimal weight of expectation. Just don’t expect lots of guff about power outputs, aerobic thresholds or heart rates and we should get along just fine. My first 10 entries will alternate between five cultural phenomena of unimpeachable greatness (The Dynamighty) and five targets for rotten fruit (The Dynamightgiveitamiss), all viewed through the wholly subjective prism of my inexpert judgment. Then, and only then, will you and I truly know if we can form a lasting, prosperous relationship.

But if that’s ever going to happen, I suppose I should first give some indication of my identity. My name is Chris, I’m in my late thirties, and when I’m not spending time with my female romantical partner at our west London home, I can usually be found doing an enjoyable yet (I’m told) strangely unenviable job in the national media. I won’t say where I work, and you should take this omission purely as a belt-and-braces approach to the usual disclaimer that my views are my own, not my employer’s. I also have an association with a cycling publication, and although those guys don’t keep a roof over my head, I won’t be revealing who they are as my views do not belong to them either. Or maybe I might name them. Let’s just see how long I can keep this up, OK?

Well, that sort of clears everything up for now. Pop back in a couple of days and we’ll get started. Cheerio for now!

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