Italian restaurant, Irish headwear. Obviously.

No Sim, it’s not Santa.

Get well soon Jonny

Well, at least pretend to be having fun.

Scream if you want to go faster. Or stop.

Photo: Steve Makin

Chipps reckons we should establish a national holiday to honour the fallen and the missing bits of mountain bike kit still adrift in the world.

Back in the early ‘90s, I got the train from London down to Brighton to see Jo Burt. Stopping at Victoria Station, I nipped into a caféé for a bacon sandwich and a coffee, then hopped onto my train. My rucksack, however, didn’t follow me and was lost to me forever (and who knows if it closed the station down while they blew it up...) I did manage to ride in borrowed clothes and shoes (now there’s a familiar story) and eventually replaced the riding gear I’d lost in an excuseheavy shopping spree. I was chuffed to see my bag reappear a couple of months later, leant up next to a tree – in a Mint Sauce cartoon in MBUK, next to Andy Pegg’s front wheel that he’d left somewhere and never found again. Reminded of this again recently, I thought about all the other bits of mountain bike kit that must be lying around the world that once belonged to somebody. Most riders have a story of driving an hour to a riding rendezvous, only to discover they’d left their shoes, or gloves, or wheels at home. Some have given up and gone home, other, more stubborn or ingenious riders, have carried on, wearing latex mechanic’s gloves, or

adapting to borrowed flat pedals again after years of SPDs. There are also the shoes left on the roof after a ride, the wheel ‘temporarily’ lent up against your mate’s boot while you pack your bike and driven off without. There are even stories of riders who have cadged a lift to a ride, only to have the driver forget them on the journey home. There’s always the sad story of the lone glove, kept for years in case its twin suddenly shows up after a lonely exile somewhere in a strange kit bag. At what point do you give up and realise that it’s never coming home? Or do you never give up? Another example of lost treasures happens to me more than I’d like to admit. It’s the lost bag of clothes. These can vary from the bag of damp socks left in the car for a week to the time-capsule of ‘a bag I packed in 2002 and never unpacked’. This inevitably contains a couple of race jerseys from teams now long-gone, some questionably lurid Lycra tights and a pair of fossilised shoes now permanently attached to rusted cleats...

Anyone a size 43?

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