Things To Do When You're 90 and other stories

 I can't see the news elsewhere on the internet yet so maybe this miscellany of literary, musical and entirely personal concerns of mine might have the honour of 'breaking' it to that audience.

My 100% reliable grapevine of cycling news assures me that my uncle-in-law, if that is such a thing without being 'twice removed', has now set probably the most astonishing of his many time-trialling records, many of which are age-related, having ridden such events every season for about 75 years, and has posted a time of 1 hour, 11 minutes and 42 seconds for 25 miles, which won him the Veteran Time Trial Association Championship title at the weekend, at the age of 90.

To explain that to those who arrive at DG Books not fully conversant with the details of time trialling or how the Veteran category works- I used to do 1.11 for 25 miles when I was 35 but I was not much good at it and only gained any sort of respectability by sitting on the bike all day, for 12 Hours, and thus being better at it than those who thought better of such torment.

25 miles was always the common currency of time trialling but it was also my worst subject. The point about the veteran category is that it is for those over 40 and was invented a long time before 40 was regarded as not much older than 25. 40 was old then but isn't any more and so the incremental allowance for each year over 40 that you are is worth having, especially if you're still not bad at the age of 90. I'm told that the fastest rider in the Vets Championships this year was a 61 year old who recorded a time of 50.20, which would have made him the overall record holder circa 1969 when the great maverick, Alf Engers, was drilling holes in his frame as well as such short distance records in controversial fashion and Concorde looked relatively pedestrian, breaking the sound barrier in the sky as it flew over our house in Gloucester.  

Ron Hallam's ride makes him, surely, the first nonagenarian to ride 25 miles on a bicycle at more than 20 mph, and then some, and sets a standard 9 minutes ahead of the previous record for a 90 year old which, one might think, is a record that might stand for some time if not forever but records are only there to be broken and the species, so we are told, is always evolving. Not that you'd know that from looking at some of the people various democracies have decided they wanted to put in charge.

But Ron Hallam is a good guy. I haven't seen him since I was a kid, I don't think, but he also brought a standard of good manners to sport in a way that generations since his have sometimes lost their grasp of. I'm not related to him anywhere near closely enough to have benefitted from the same DNA. If I had been, I might have spent more time on the bike and won something. As it has been, I persisted with the writing and ruined an entirely different set of people's chances of a few minor prizes at that instead.

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I finished Human Traces by Sebastian Faulks, I think it was yesterday or the day before. It's hard to believe that is the same book I abandoned when it was new, subsequently gave away in hardback and only bought again in paperback to restore some sort of Faulks completism. It is profound, compelling (all those things), presumably deeply researched and only suspect for how many pages, later on, are devoted to the verbatim lectures on psychiatry, or the vague feeling that Seb Faulks is playing with me here, making me feel 'moved' when the dry textbooks he's writing about, and the idea of 'what it is to be human', wouldn't usually do so.

But, credit where credit is due and, like an old raincoat, Sebastian Faulks won't ever let you down. 

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The TV drama, Roadkill, has been good. I'm not a devotee of TV drama because much of it seems to depend on people pointing guns at each other but, so far - and I'm up to episode 3 on i-player- that hasn't happened. It's been more English than that. It has all the dubious intrigue, the subterfuge and, basically outright lying and self-serving that we have come to expect from politicians. Its problem is that we like Hugh Laurie, we know he's a decent chap and he doesn't look anything like the cast of libertarian, leave, freedom-toting weirdos that we know to be real, such as Boris, Gove, Farage and Jacob.  You need to look strange to look like one of them. Hugh Laurie only looks like Hugh Grant did when he did his Jeremy Thorpe but the flamboyant MP for North Devon in the early 70's only had half of the very minor, ramshackle Liberal Party behind him then and had precious little more chance of 'power', whatever that is, than Mr. Farage has ever had, but, credit to Nigel, he won, he got his way if only by putting other lunatics in charge of the asylum.