Enter The Friday Night Ride

I do not want to give out info about other people so I will hide their identities by using the common names John and Atsushi.
John and Atsushi are quite close so when they invited me to join them on their weekly Friday night ride, I was relieved that they were talking about cycling.

They have been riding this course together once a week for about 2.5 years now so to expect distrust towards me as an outsider was natural. They had a slight tiff at the beginning of the evening and Atsushi threathened to boycott the ride due to potential 'rain' (that never arrived) so I wondered if it was just bitchiness aimed at my presence or whether he was refering to the inevitable tears that would be present during their kiss-and-make-up-embrace.

Anyway, we rode the circuit several times and I will see if I can nick the map of it from John's blog at some point. John is a fairly big bloke and Atsushi pretty small so from the view of riding behind them, it looked like some old Lord chasing down his unwilling houseboy. Naturally, this also caused me to get the Benny Hill theme tune stuck in my head.

The Lord has been into riding for a few years now and has embraced cycling's cultural aspects, such as garish, tight shirts and a healthy disdain for trendy fixed-gear bikes and those who stradle them. It comes as a surprise then that he actually rides a bright yellow fixie himself. But it is different, he says, it is a track bike, he says and he did not get it because a magazine told him it was cool, he says (which, of course, is all true). Oh, yeah, and we must not call the bike yellow, either.

Anyway, I went over again on the Friday just gone but this time it really was rain-stopped-play so we just drunk beer, talked bollocks and watched the TdF instead. The rain was severe, too- I think we counted, at minimum, 7 or 8 rain drops hit our skin. Come to think of it, that may have been the splashback from John taking a leak against his front wall.