
I promised myself I would not drink too much and I would leave at a reasonable hour. No. My work xmas party got a bit messy… Wine ( I later found out ) does not agree with me when I drink too much of it, Brandy is best not swigged out of the bottle, and cigarettes are not great if you plan to race the next day. I did reluctantly manage to leave the party at 3am only to walk home to try and sober up for what was coming in a few hours.
By 2pm in the afternoon I was running on 50%… enough to get my ass into a jacket and gloves and get the hell out of the house and into town. So off I went to meet folks up at the Bullring where I was met by Simon on his crazy Shorter low pro and Toby on his red 531 conversion, both Simon and Toby reside in Shrewsbury so fair play! we sat, chatted for a while and waited for the others… then waited some more, then Shamim turned up at 2.30. So by this time it was obvious it was only going to be us 4 until more folks joined at 4.30 ( we hoped ) so off we went for cycle round town then down to the Custard Factory to snap some shots of the bikes ( these will trickle onto Spinwell in the coming weeks ). After an hour or so of chatting and larking about it was almost time to meet the others but before that we had a job to do… We needed Xmas crackers! Shamim wanted us to play a game ‘foot down’ which involved beating each other with said crackers until your opponent puts their foot down. GREAT! “Latifs!” purveyors of everything, this is the place to go for cheap stuff like crackers. so we pulled in and parked up while Shamim went inside… They had a cafe attached to the side so I rummaged in my pockets for a couple of golden nuggets and so me and Toby went for snacks. Damn! the place looked like it was covered in 5mm of grease, everything in the cabinet had cling film on it… not a good look. Anyway I got a Tea and a Mars bar complete with a wrapper that was hard to grip due to its slippery nature, Toby got Simon a Mars milkshake and he got a coffee.
4.30, Bullring, Hardy joined us as did Tom… while we waited Shamim received a tx from an unknown who later turned out to be Blowie Ben saying he had almost lost his finger in his drivetrain and could not make it, Josh had crashed and flipped his Koga that morning riding to work so could not make it, Arjun didn’t finish work until 8 and Fin had his bike in bits on his floor… the rest, well, it was Christmas and most folks had gone home to the sticks or even Canada for one lucky fellow!
4.45 Bullring car park roof some skidding, picture taking and trackstanding then enough talking lets race! River st, Digbeth was the place. A flat road no traffic, and no wind! We went with a straight up drag style race… first one over the line goes through. I was in bad shape from the night before lest we forget but I raced nonetheless and might I add that it was touch and go whether I would vomit all over the finishing line or not.
Round one.
1st – Hardy
2nd – Tom
3rd – Me ( quite rightly so )
Round two
1st – Simon
2nd – Toby
3rd – Shamim
Finals
Winner – Hardy
Runner up – Simon
A great day had by all, real nice folks and some real nice bikes… here is to a 2009 full of more of the good stuff.
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