A few shots..

A couple of stunts as featured in Tom Brights excellent Dry Spell which can be purchased here for the measly sum of 7 English pounds including P&P

The man himself Tom Bright getting locked in to an icey P

Aggroman Scott Taylor blasts the hip at the Sage Gateshead

These would have been up sooner but I smashed my camera and had no way of getting the images off the XD card but my new computer has a superduper card reader- sorted.

What a way to make a living

Unless you are one of the fortunate souls who skips to work whistling a merry tune because its so good you can’t wait to get there, there are probably aspects of your job that really gets on your tits.
I don’t particularly hate my job, its secure, pays ok, full flexi time and its piss easy but God knows sometimes I feel like straggling myself with the cord on my telephone. (I work in an undisclosed Government department in an office environment).

For your reading pleasure I have written about some of these annoyances in no particular order.

- Sorry if there is a reoccurring theme with fat people but there are too many here and I don’t like them.

Ultimate Diet

Aside from mundane celebrity gossip the next hottest agenda for any office working bint is diets and dieting. Most of the women in the office are overweight; some are absolutely massive (more on those later). I’m talking about the vast majority of women who clog offices here.

T-shirt: American Apparel XXXXXL £24.99

Jeans: Jeff Capes' Signature Denim £69.99

Jewelry: Models own.

Atkins, low carb, cabbage soup, how many points in that, calorie count, cakes out, veg in, cant have this, I want that, look at her I want to be that skinny (but I’m fat)

There is always a new diet that they are trying or something they are cutting down or whatever and a weekly update on who’s lost weight. “ooooooh I lost half a pound this week. “ Half a pound? Half a pound? What the fuck did you do, get on the scales without your kegs on this week pet? Sheesh.

These are the pear shaped people who would love to be thin. But the simple fact of the matter is given the choice they pick hot dogs over celery sticks every time. Everyone is talking about diets, but I’m not sure who is actually following them.

Football backchat

If you are a bloke in an office you have to know about football. It is one of the steps of the office social ladder. Start spouting match reports up and down the office and you’ll soon make new friends. Knowing about football will take you along way son.
You can bet that the same conversations will be happening in every office block in the country, because most of these morons all read the same news paper. You would be amazed the amount of times you will here the same opinion expressed throughout the course of a day because they have all read the back page of the Sun or watched Match of the Day.

Most football fans don’t even play football, they just talk about it. What's that all about? I’ve never understood how people can have such strong opinions about something they don’t even take part in.

Hold the door policy

There is a kind of unwritten rule here that you hold the door open for someone if they are coming behind you. Fair enough you might think, a bit of common courtesy goes along way, especially when you have to get your security pass out to open the door. But people have mistook courtesy for taking the piss, its not uncommon for someone to be entering the building, look behind them to see someone on the horizon and either wait for the person or signal for them to hurry up. This causes the person behind to feel obliged to run so that the person is not waiting for too long, making this person look like a prize tit.

Look, just open the door and if someone is immediately behind you fair play hold the door.

But if you have to squint to make them out they are clearly too far away so shut the fucking door!

Characters

Working in an office with so many people you can expect to come across your fair amount of rare breeds. There are so many here that you wouldn’t believe, the types of people that harbour dark secrets on their home computers hard drive.
The one that sticks out in my mind is the one known as ‘Bird man’. Now this fella is a proper piece of work. He is about 5 ft 4, pot belly with a dour expression not unlike that of the Penguin of Batman fame (Trust me if my phones camera didn’t make a shutter noise his ugly dish would be staring at you right now). Aside from the fact that he resembles the Penguin he also makes the most annoying bird noises coupled with whistling the same tune day in day out. I think more than a few people want him dead.

Picture for dramatisation purposes only

Toilets

Unless you go to the toilet at about 11am just after the cleaner has been in to disinfect the floor and refill the toilet roll dispensers you may as well forget it. I’m not sure about you but I’ve been using a toilet for my waste excretion for a number of years now and I can safely say that I’m quite adept at using a netty. I can wipe my arse like a champion and I don’t piss on the floor.
For some it is painfully obvious that the toilet is something they do not have at home, I can’t see another reason why they would be so shit at using one. There is piss all over the floor especially in the first of the 3 cubicles. My theory on this is that the fat people are the culprits and are too lazy to walk to cubicle 2 or 3. To combat this people throw loads of toilet roll on the floor to soak up the piss. This pattern continues all day until the floor is covered in pissy rags.
Other points to note is that if you decide to go for a number 2 you will notice an underground game that must go on in there. ‘Flick the snot’ I believe it’s called. Snots are peppered all the way up the door. Delightful.

Some people don’t bother to flush even if they have just dropped a conga eel in the pan. These are usually the people who don’t bother to wash their hands. Its no coincidence either that the toilets on the first and second floors are pristine because all the fattys stick to the ground floor.

Serving suggestion

Fat Gits

We’re talking next level chubbers here folks. I’m not kidding there are some absolute whoppers. Everyone likes a bit of bait but come on now this is ridiculous. I read somewhere that Britain is sleep walking into an obesity epidemic, are we not already there? There has to be a point if your fat when you look in the mirror and think “fuck me I’m 26 stone how did that happen?!” There is no excuse for it, do more exercise and stop eating chips before Greenpeace turns up and tries to roll you back in the sea.

Fear the cumberland  fat boy!

The search continues

Street spots. They are everywhere. Some have been around forever and some are only rideable for a day. Some are brand new. Some have yet to be found. Living in a city or built up area there is always something new to be found.

For me it’s this constant cycle of regeneration and construction breathing life into the city that keeps riding interesting. There is a perfectly good skatepark local to me that I enjoy immensely and I could happily ride there trying out new lines or sessioning one of the grind blocks to my hearts content.

But there is something about riding like that day in day out which reminds me too much of hitting a piece of apparatus at the gym or turning up at the running track with a pair of running shoes. The skatepark is a constant. Nothing about it is going to change, it will be the same today as it was yesterday. You’ve all seen the kids at the local skatepark. Turn up at the park decked out like a Topshop mannequin, ride said skatepark doing same lines and doing same tricks as everyone else all the while having a sly glance to see what colour Profile hubs everyone is running. Then he returns home to lurk on Streetphire message board occasionally posting the odd message containing weak insults and terrible English.
I don’t get on my bike to practice or train. It’s a bicycle not a fashion accessory or whatever. Riding should be about riding at the end of the day. I mean that in the truest sense of word, i.e getting from A to B. That’s half the fun! Blasting down streets, jumping kerbs, bins, pumping off bumps and stairs. And of course the best part about this is that you come across new areas, new developments and new spots. Sometimes you revisit a place or spot you had been to before but since then your riding has improved or you learnt a new trick. Suddenly a spot you rode past a few years back is suddenly unlocked to you with new opportunities. Finding some boards to put on stairs or making a hop-o-meter out of some construction tape. Riding old spots with different people shows a different perspective on whats possible and gives you renewed inspiration to a spot you thought was dead. And there is something appealling about riding a kicker or quarter made out of pallets rather than the perfect ones down the park..

Take this spot for example. These banks surround a truck depot in Benton, North Tyneside. For years I had passed this spot peering through the mesh fence plotting out imaginary lines that could be possible on the various banks. The problem was it would be impossible to ride with all of those huge trucks parked up. Then one day as I was riding home all the trucks had gone, the company gone bust or relocated. I was over the moon! I began trying to find a way in and thankfully the yard was easily infiltrated as there was a gap in the fence. Success.
The banks were even better than they looked, slightly transitioned and they got steeper and steeper as they went around the yard. It also had a corner section which was really fun too.
The next time I came here I brought Marty, Jo, Tom Finch, Rob and H Man. It was a great session! Rob had the idea to pull the flag stones back at the top and stick a log behind it, making a kicker at the top of the bank. It worked really well and we rode it all afternoon. The fence ride got sessioned to hell as well. On another session Scott Taylor came up and did over ice picks on the extension.

Photo by H-Man

Unfortunately I only got to ride this spot a handful of times before another haulage company moved into the yard. I should have known better than to take something that good for granted! Gutted. Hopefully with the good old credit crunch this one will go bust as well and I can ride it again.

Get out there, go somewhere you haven’t been before and explore. You never know what you might find! You cant beat the feeling of finding something new before anyone else has ridden it and putting the first tire marks on the wall or the first peg marks on the rail. Even if you find sod all its more fun than sitting in the skatepark all day.

Happy New Year and all that jazz..

Hope you had a good Christmas and New Year eh? Mine was belting.. still recovering actually. So a few things, the Boardroom is open and has been packed out (15 people max per sesh) for most 2 hour time slots during the day. The park still needs a few finishing touches here and there but everyone seems to enjoy it epecially the 10+ Exhibition Park kids on almost identical setups who rode it when I was there. Have you ever ridden a bike with pegs, brakes or hubs without profiles I wonder? hmm.

On a recent riding session one of the best spots I've ever seen was discovered in an undisclosed location, unfortunately the fences are so high/spiky you would need a set of ladders to get over them.

Good luck finding this one..